Patricia Gherovici Lacan Psychoanalysis and Comedy 1

LACAN, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND COMEDY
This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic

from a psychoanalytic perspective. Edited by two leading practicing
psychoanalysts and with original contributions from Lacanian practi-
tioners and scholars, this cutting-edge volume proposes a paradigm
swerve, a Freudian slip on a banana peel. Psychoanalysis has long
been associated with tragedy and there is a strong warrant to take up
comedy as a more productive model for psychoanalytic practice and
critique. Jokes and the comic have not received nearly as much
consideration as they deserve given the fundamental role they play
in our psychic lives and the way they unite the fields of aesthetics,
literature, and psychoanalysis. Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy
addresses this lack and opens up the discussion.
patricia gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor

and faculty at Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association New York.
She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group.
manya steinkoler teaches literature, film, and psychoanalytic
theory at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She
is a psychoanalyst and member of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Asso-
ciation New York and Espace Analytique (Paris).
LACAN, PSYCHOANALYSIS,
AND COMEDY
PATRICIA GHEROVICI
Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association New York
MANYA STEINKOLER
CUNY
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York ny 10013
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107086173
© Cambridge University Press 2016
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2016
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Names: Gherovici, Patricia, editor. | Steinkoler, Manya, editor.
Title: Lacan, psychoanalysis, and comedy / [edited by] Patricia Gherovici,
Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association New York, Manya Steinkoler,
Manhattan College, New York.
Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015467 | isbn 9781107086173 (Hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. | Psychoanalysis. | Comedy.
Classification: LCC BF173 .L1793 2016 | DDC 150.19/5092–dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015467
isbn 978-1-107-08617-3 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Introduction 1
Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler
part i the laughing cure 23

1 Sarah’s laughter: Where babies and humor come from 25
Manya Steinkoler
2 Psychoanalysis as gai saber: Toward a new episteme of laughter 36
Dany Nobus
3 Laughing about nothing: Democritus and Lacan 60
Patricia Gherovici
4 The surplus jouissance of the joke from Freud to Lacan 73
Marcel Drach
5 Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on the economy
of jokes 82
Jean-Michel Rabaté
6 Mother-pumper and the analyst’s donuts 104
Jamieson Webster
7 Not in the humor: Bulimic dreams 113
Carol Owens
part ii comedy on the couch 131

8 Comedy and the agency of the letter in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream 133
Matthew Sharpe
v
vi Contents
9 Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy: Measure for Measure after
Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics 156
Geoff Boucher
10 Jane Austen’s wit-craft 184
Molly Anne Rothenberg
11 The perambulatory process: Eros, wit and society-testing in
Henry James’s “The Chaperon” 206
Sigi Jöttkandt
12 Power in the closet (and its coming out) 219
Alenka Zupančič
part iii he who laughs last, laughs last 235

Epilogue: Repetition, repetition, repetition: Richard Prince
and the three r’s 237
Simon Critchley
Index 243
Introduction
Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler
Laughter is not a decision – it happens to us, at times inappropriately

and inauspiciously. Psychoanalysis is well known for having shed some
light on the perennial mysteries of what we do not control – dreams,
parapraxes, symptoms, and sexual problems. While the Freudian slip and
the bungled act have become part of Western culture’s lingua franca, it is
less commonly known that psychoanalysis provides revelatory insights
about the mechanisms of jokes, comedy, humor and their effects. Many
people today would happily admit to their Oedipus Complex, but few
would feel comfortable reflecting on why they laugh at the humiliation of
their co-worker, titter at an ethnic or sexist remark, or realize that like
jokes, their dreams are made out of puns, witticisms and one-liners. Few
note, as Freud did, that dreams were “insufferably witty,” revealing an
annoying predilection for bad puns. And fewer have noted, as Lacan did,
that comedy allows access to the unconscious.
If someone were to ask what single book one should read to understand
the psychoanalytic method, the answer would be Jokes and Their Relation
to the Unconscious. In one brief monograph, Freud succinctly explains
how the unconscious operates: it does things with words. The psychoana-
lytic cure is not just a “talking cure,” but to further play on Austin’s
famous dictum, it does things with jokes. We propose a paradigm swerve,
a Freudian slip on a banana peel.
Freud revealed that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious.
Freud also thought that by understanding the workings of the joke, we
would be better readers of our hidden selves, discovering knowledge where
we did not expect it. Jokes and dreams share several characteristics: they
outwit an inner censor, allow satisfaction, are produced spontaneously and
forgotten quickly, and are therefore subjected to repression. Jokes offer a
shortcut to the unconscious we can use in broad daylight.
As he did with dreams, Freud gave intellectual and philosophical dignity
to jokes in his watershed book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
1
2 patricia gherovici and manya steinkoler
(1905). While Freud’s book is not about comedy per se, it unmasks the
working of the jokes and of language, and this is the stuff dreams and
comedy are made of. Freud perspicaciously noted to Fliess that “The
ostensible wit of all unconscious processes is intimately related to the
theory of the joke and the comic.”1 As in comedy, dreams and jokes bypass
the objections of consciousness outwitting censorship, disguised by riddles
and homonyms. Dreams and jokes allow access to hidden wishes while
granting aggression an acceptable outlet and establish a social tie that
satisfies repressed unconscious desires.
Illuminating the joke by exploring its psychic economy, Freud showed
that, linguistically, jokes and dreams work by condensing and displacing
meanings and making witty use of polysemy. Both dreams and jokes
function by disguising and deforming latent content. While the dream
may grant wish fulfillment for the dreamer alone, the satisfaction of the
joke is shared, at least most of the time. Economically, the joke bypasses
the inhibiting factor both in the teller of the joke and in the listener,
allowing for a gain in pleasure. As two essays in this collection by Drach
and Rabaté will make explicit, the psychic payoffs garnered by jokes,
witticisms, and puns are subject to dynamics of economy. Jokes, Freud
tells us, are a way we profit from the unconscious in waking life with
laughter as the delightful dividend.
Jokes were serious business for the father of psychoanalysis. Jokes were
serious business for Jacques Lacan, as well. Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s
joke book distances the joke from the folkloric terrain of ethnic Jewish
studies that was Freud’s entrypoint, initially having envisioned his
book on jokes as a monograph on Jewish humor. Extending Freud’s
discovery that the joke and the comic reveal the logic of the unconscious,
Lacan’s psychoanalytic technique amplified Freud’s linguistic theories on
the Witz.
Like a joke, a successful psychoanalytic interpretation concerns not only
a specific word’s meaning, but also its polysemy and its connotations. For
Lacan, an analyst’s effective intervention is a kind of punctuation that
operates on the analysand’s speech by what Flaubert called “le mot juste,”
the “right word.” And, just as in the case of the punch line, the timing of
the intervention is essential to its efficacy. Aaron Schuster has noted that
good timing is indispensable for the production of laughter.2 This is true
1
Sigmund Freud, Letter from Freud to Fliess, September 11, 1899. Jeffrey Masson, editor. The complete
letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 371.
2
See Aaron Schuster, “A Philosophy of Tickling,” Cabinet 50 (Summer 2013): 41–48.
Introduction 3
for both comedy and for something else that makes us laugh–tickling.
When either goes on for too long, the fun is over. Lacan’s controversial
practice of the variable-length session requires the same attention to timing
in order to produce unconscious effects. If the session length is predictable,
one misses an opportunity to be clinically effective; the cut (scansion)
attempts to produce a punchline that will reveal a hidden truth and create
new meaning. We see than Lacan’s interest in humor is not purely
scholarly but also practical, it concerns a technical savoir faire regarding
efficacious psychoanalytic technical interventions. Just because most analy-
sands do not find their analysts funny, does not mean that their analysts
might not have have taken Freud’s book on jokes seriously.
In the Beginning was Laughter

The young Lacan was closely connected to the Surrealists who transformed
the humor of the morbid, absurd, and nonsensical into an art form,
showing creative ingenuity with humor. André Breton coined the phrase
“black humor,” which would designate an important genre of literature
and film in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a group, the
Surrealists were preoccupied with a myriad of modes of disturbing and
provocative nonsense and hilariously incongruous juxtapositions. They
influenced Lacan’s theorization of paranoia, a major contribution to the
history of psychoanalysis, and praised his early work.
Central to Lacan’s theory of the origins of subjectivity was his inven-
tion of the mirror stage, a dialectical progression in which the child
identifies with his or her mirror image and marks it with jubilatory
laughter. This decisive turning point in the infant’s ego formation via
identification with the mirror image is a joyful moment of triumphant
illusory mastery over the body, punctuated by laughter. Laughter is at the
origin of the ego.
Lacan’s mirror stage marks the beginning of subjective constitution. In
fact, child development has often been theorized in terms of the infant and
toddler’s acquisition of varying abilities of smiling: in the mirror, at others,
and eventually through the capacity to laugh and make jokes. Before
speaking, walking, or even crawling, infants laugh and joke.
Laughter is central to humans. As Lacan writes in My Teaching, dreams,
failure, and laughter are attributes specific to the speaking subject.3
3
Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008), 79.
Long ago, Aristotle had observed that animals do not laugh. Recent
scientific research has questioned the accepted knowledge of the Greek
polymath showing that laughter is not exclusive to homo sapiens, and
recent studies have demonstrated that our primate cousins seem to be
having a very good time. While animals may play, animals do not play
jokes. Moreover, while some animals are capable of deception, erasing
their traces to avoid predation, animals do not speak. They can com-
municate but they do not have language. Bees, for instance, show
sophisticated communication strategies indicating floral location, but a
bee does not give the wrong information just to make fun of its fellow
bee. Jokes are proper only to speaking beings or to our beloved Tom
and Jerry.
Comedy of the sexes

As far as the birds and the bees are concerned, as subjects of language, the
joke is on us – we are laughing and laughed at in the proverbial comedy of
the sexes. Lovers act ridiculously, which the theater of Molière and
Marivaux so delightfully depicts. Alceste’s misanthropic proclamations
ranting against humanity’s hypocrisy are hilariously controverted by his
mad passion for Célimène, who embodies virtually every quality he claims
to despise. Marivaux’s very name has become a French noun depicting a
kind of game playing with regard to love that keeps it on the side of levity
and wit. When Lacan avers the affinity between love and comedy, he is not
making light of love, quite the contrary – he grants it its central place in
the theater of life.
Far from being harmonious, love is always a surprising encounter with
excess. At times, it is anxiety-producing, and it always entails an overload
that opposes its illusion of completion. Love supplements for deficit and
discordance, however humorous this seems to others, a fact exploited by
every romantic comedy. This is perhaps summed up best in the last line
of Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 comedy, Some Like it Hot, where Joe
E. Brown, responding to Jack Lemmon’s protestations that they cannot
be married because he is not a woman, replies, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
The point, so perfectly depicted in Wilder’s film is simply that the fact
that Daphne (Jack Lemmon) is a man in no way impinges on Oswald’s
(Joe E Brown) fantasy. Oswald can only say “nobody’s perfect” and go on
loving “Daphne.” The end of the film is a perfect illustration of one of
Lacan’s definitions of love: giving what one doesn’t have to a person who
doesn’t want it.
Introduction 5
“Love is a comic feeling”

For Lacan, love is inseparable from comedy: “Love is a comic feeling,”4 he
observed, placing the problem of love at the center of comedy. Insofar as
love is blind, the lover believes she has found her twin soul, while
audiences laugh at the glaring error. A standard trope in comedy, the
examples are myriad: Titania, the queen of the fairies, is enamored with
Bottom in the form of an ass; Mozart’s couple Fiordiligi and Dorabella
famously end up in love with one another’s original partner; the perfect
match is always a mismatch. Transference love, the very motor of psycho-
analysis, is a comedy of mistaken identity, a comedy of errors.
It follows that when exploring the concept of transference-love in
psychoanalysis in his seminar On Transference, Lacan would be able to
further elaborate on the connection between love and comedy noticing
that there is something “irresistibly comical” about people in love:5 People
in love are funny. Expounding on the comic nature of love and sex
throughout his career, in his late teaching, Lacan refers to love as silliness
or “funny business” (bêtise), a kind of nonsense.6 He shows that the sexual
reality of the unconscious is comic insofar as it is an equivocal handling of
nonsense. It is not surprising that not only is sex the most recurrent theme
in comedy, but sex, Lacan reminds us, is “innately comical.”7 Lacan’s
dictum “there is no such thing as sexual rapport,” highlights that there is
no complementarity between the sexes and despite the occasional pleas-
ures, there is no harmony in the bedroom. Sex is always too much or not
enough, takes place too early or too late, is “it” but is not “it,” and so on.
Satisfaction is fleeting.
The act of copulation is the stuff of comedy. This is not lost on most
children. For Freud, children are budding theorists, precocious researchers,
often distrusting accepted knowledge about reproduction and countering
scientific explanations with complex theories of their own. Freud gave us a
limited list of them, a colorful compilation of infantile sexual theories,
which sound funny to us but serious to the children who invent them. At
the same time, the scientific truth often sounds preposterous to children
who respond to “the sperm and egg story” with peals of laughter. This
4
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:
du Seuil, 1998), 135.
5
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre VIII: Le transfert 1960–1961 (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 134.
6
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: On the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), 12.
7
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XV: Moment de Conclure, November 5, 1977, unpublished papers.
illustrates how adult sexuality and the scientific theories we know to be
true are nevertheless still narrative constructions. They show that not only
is gender a social construction but that sex is as well. Judith Butler and
Anne Fausto-Sterling have persuasively argued that sex and gender are
discursively imposed norms. What can we do about the fact that sex
surpasses both sense and science? Perhaps what children do – laugh.
Laughter allows us a way to make do with this excess that transcends
and stunts the subject. In fact, what the “truth about sexuality” teaches us
most of all is that sexuality becomes most comedic precisely when one tries
to make sense of it. As Groucho Marx once observed, anyone who can see
through women is missing a lot!
Dying of laughter
Lacan further developed Freud’s observation that sexual reproduction and
mortality are connected. Sex, like death, is beyond sense, but comedy
lassos this beyond into an equivocation that makes for laughter rather than
sadness or despair. In his 1962–1963 Anxiety seminar, Lacan puns on the
relation between laughter, love, death, and comedy as “tightly entwined
with the demand for love-making.” He continues, “to faire l’amour–if you
will, faire l’amourir, to do it to death, it is even à mourir de rire, to die of
laughter. I am not accentuating the side of love that partakes in a comical
feeling just for the sake of it. In any case, this is precisely where the restful
side of post-orgasm resides. If this demand for death is what gets satisfied,
well, good gracious, it’s lightly satisfied, because one gets off lightly.”8
While referring to love-making, Lacan exploits the French homophony
between orgasm, la petite mort (little death), which in his pun becomes
love-die-laugh. His point is that orgasm is related to death, (as the little
ending rather than the real one) and he goes from amour (love) to mourir
(to die), but by way of rire (to laugh) suggesting that love-making is a
comical way to confront and avoid death at the same time. Sex is a way of
playing with death while staying alive. To “get off lightly” is a further pun
on the levity involved in sexual jouissance.
Lacan would further reflect on the imbrication of love, sex, and death at
the end of his life, in a seminar evocatively titled Moment to Conclude,
where he made an explicit paradigm shift from tragedy to comedy as the
representative genre for psychoanalysis: “Life is not tragic. It is comic. This
8
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X On Anxiety Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price
(Polity: Cambridge, 2014) 263 (translation slightly modified).
Introduction 7
is however, why it is so curious that Freud would not find something
better than the Oedipus complex, a tragedy, to discuss it, as if that was
what it was all about. . . . He could have taken a shortcut – comedy.”9 We
are not traveling down the well-trodden royal road, one that long before
the Via Apia was already present in Oedipus’ fateful trek from Corinth to
Thebes, rather we propose taking the fast lane to the unconscious –
comedy.
Don’t Cut the Comedy!

Psychoanalysis has long been associated with tragedy (Oedipus, Antigone,
Hamlet), but there is a strong warrant, especially now when the Oedipus
complex has been criticized for its supposed universality, to show psycho-
analysis’s intimate link with comedy. It is comedy that enables us to
understand the silliness implicit in the notion of the phallus. As Moustafa
Safouan puts it, “the phallus is the joke of phallicism.”10 The phallus is
what is propped up to account for the impossibility of signifying sexual
difference in the unconscious (the unconscious is unreasonable; it knows
only one sex – the phallus).
Taking distance from the Oedipal model, and thus from tragedy,
comedy would allow Lacan to elaborate upon the function of the phallus
in psychoanalysis. Lacan explicitly says, “The phallus is the essence of
comedy.”11 The phallus is a hodgepodge, a pastiche, a semblance, precisely
because it does not resolve the problem of sexual difference. It is rather a
prosthesis to and supplement for a structural insufficiency. As a stand-in
for the thing missing that can never be there, the phallus is predicated on
an error, namely that of taking an organ for the signifier of sexual
difference. This recurrent error is comedic; the comedy of Eros is a comedy
of errors.
Comedy’s humor makes of love not a hallowed, exceptional experience
but a banal one which takes place not in a remote romantic scenario but in
the humdrum of daily life. If the humorous situations seem improbable,
they become nevertheless believable due to the presence of what Lacan
calls “a hidden signifier” that guarantees their comic effect. He states: “The
sphere of comedy is created by the presence at its center of a hidden
9
Lacan, Le Séminaire XV: Moment de Conclure.
10
Quoted in Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982), 134.
11
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XXII: R.S.I., March 11, 1975, unpublished papers.
signifier” which is no other than psychoanalysis’ most envied and contended
personality – Mr. Phallus, who has been around for a long time. In the
Old Comedy, Lacan tells us, the phallus “is there in person.”12 In ancient
comedy, the phallus was not hidden but at center stage, displayed as an
oversized, ridiculous prop whose mere appearance caused uproarious laugh-
ter in the audience. This response was triggered by the unveiling of the
phallus precisely as a prop. Famously observed in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata,
where the erections of the Spartans and Athenians are caricatured by the use
of strap-on broomsticks or poles that make the audience burst into laughter.
The phallus sustained, nevertheless, a social link evident in the origins of
comedy. The “komos” designated a procession of men carrying phalluses
parading as part of a community’s religious (pagan) celebration.
Since time immemorial, insofar as it is a prop precariously staying afloat,
the power of the phallus necessarily entails the prospect of detumescence;
its efficacy is fleeting; we might sink. Lacan explains theoretically how this
precarious device manages to buoy us up, “The phallus is nothing more
than a signifier, the signifier of this flight. Life goes by, life triumphs,
whatever happens. If the comic hero trips up and lands in the soup, the
little fellow nevertheless survives.”13 The phallus that nobody has or can be,
but most everyone can borrow, keeping its wearer afloat, is a lifesaver, a
flotation device, something to hold on to so that we do not drown in the
soup of life.
Comedy allows us to bind death to life, affirming life in its imperman-
ence. Mel Brooks’s famous lines eloquently convey this precious quality of
comedy: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when I fall into an
open sewer and die.” Comedy confronts us with mortality all the while
making us laugh. We do not need to fear death; we just need to be sure we
are not there when it arrives, as Woody Allen advocates.
Comedy successfully negotiates life’s transience, avoiding the descent
into melancholy; the comic hero may fall into the sewer, but life triumphs
while remaining fleeting. The brush with death is not chilling but thrilling,
Linking failure to life and laughter, rather than to death and silence,
comedy situates us differently in relation to the abyss. While tragedy
“functions in the direction of a triumph of death” because the tragic hero’s
conflict always leads to death, in comedy, the hero survives by transform-
ing himself; he is an agent of the endurance of life – the comedic hero has
12
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Dennis
Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 314.
13
Ibid., 314.
Introduction 9
learnt to live with the death drive.14 Like Wile E. Coyote or Buster Keaton,
the comic hero never stops not dying. Comedy euthanizes death’s lethality.
Encroaching upon prescribed boundaries while playing at the limit, the
fun in comedy emerges. The comedic transgression amuses us because we
vicariously enjoy the perpetrator’s violations while remaining on the side of
the law. Identification in comedy is not the key; we laugh often without
identifying with the comic hero. We laugh at Tweety’s abuse of Sylvester
the cat, who keeps returning for more, and more, and more. We laugh at
an excess we cannot identify with at the level of the ego, but that resonates
at the level of the drive. This is also why the lovers’ comedy is “irresistible” –
we are relieved that it is not our own.
What makes us laugh exceeds the control of the political power and
ideology that subtends it. The unruly body holds sway, unmasking the
puffed up posturing. Flatulence trumps abstinence as great airs become
literal. However much a subject may be complicit or enraptured with any
given controlling discourse, the effects of comedy intrude upon the
physical body. The unruliness of the body is exposed. Comedy accepts
mortality as ineluctable but tolerable, linking failure to life and laughter
rather than to death and silence, situating us differently in relation to
the abyss.
The funny bone is a material part of the body, not just a metaphor.
Comedy makes room for the unassimilable alterity that resists our efforts to
tame it. Comedy works on this breach in sense and comprehension that Lacan
called the Real. This is evident in Lacan’s evocation of Harpo Marx, “the
terrible dumb brother,” whose inscrutable smile sustains doubt and “radical
annihilation.” Lacan praises the “stuff of the Marx brothers’ extraordinary
farce and uninterrupted play of ‘jokes’ that makes their activity so valuable.”15
Harpo’s crazy smile presentifies the silent Real of death, life in all its
happenstance and finitude, emphasizing that comedy is on the side
of life in all its unbearable absurdity. Like an analyst, Harpo plays the fool
and we are never sure of how to read his mute smile. Is it dim-witted or
the greatest wit of all?
Most people remember Lacan’s work on tragedy in the 1950s and that
Hamlet was Lacan’s main literary source. Hamlet’s last words, “The rest is
silence,” illustrates Lacan’s idea that tragic action offers a purified realiza-
tion that leaves uncovered the real, ultimate object of desire – death itself.
In his Seminar On Ethics (1959–1960) Lacan revisited the cathartic function
of tragedy and developed the notion that comedy is a refusal or
14 15
Ibid., 313. Ibid., 55.
postponement of this trajectory. He made use of the Marx brothers, and
Harpo in particular, for this development. Already in what is known as his
second seminar, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Lacan discussed at length Plautus and Molière’s
Amphitryon finding in this comedy of doubles that the ego has its say,
and the ego is not who you think he is; the ego is somebody else.16
Comedy would stay with Lacan because psychoanalysis stayed with Lacan.
Lacan explicitly states that he had the comic genre in mind when he began
to discuss formations of the unconscious. Just a few years later, he would
devote many lessons of his seminar to explore comedies, including Aris-
tophanes’ Lysistrata and The Clouds, Molière’s The School for Wives, and
Genet’s play The Balcony showing the way the phallus is implicated in
power, and its failures.
For Lacan, comedy introduces a new relation to speech that differs
from tragedy establishing a different type of social link, making explicit
our imbrication in the signifying order. He considers comedy as “the
representation of the end of a communion meal from which tragedy has
evolved.”17 The phallus on stage, a standard practice of ancient comedy,
allows Lacan to ascribe ancient comedy with a ceremonial value, compar-
ing comic theater to a Catholic communion mass, noting that comedy
reestablishes the signifying order of language and culture, and moreover
exhibits the root of its symbolic logic, the phallus.18 Comedy as a repre-
sentation is already at a remove from the ritual itself. Working its magic at
the border between jouissance and meaning, comedy allows us to move a
step further from catharsis, to transubstantiation not of the body of Christ,
but of a signifier that makes reality a little more palatable. Understanding
this theoretical truism, Groucho Marx noted that while he was not crazy
about reality, it was still the only place to get a decent meal.
Comedy allowed Lacan to add a psychoanalytic twist to Hegel’s con-
tention that comedy brings the divine down to the human level: “One
must simply remember that the element in comedy that satisfies us, the
element that makes us laugh, that makes us appreciate it in its full human
dimension, not excluding the unconscious, is not so much the triumph of
life as its flight, the fact that life slips away, runs off, escapes all those
barriers that oppose it . . .”19 Lacan explains that unlike in tragedy where
16
Lacan, The Seminar. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Edited
by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991),
258–259, 263–267, 270.
17 18
Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 262. Ibid.
19
Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314.
Introduction 11
action catches up to desire in death, in comedy, desire always exceeds
action. In this sense, comedy is a triumph of the subject and its survival.
Comedy confronts us with the precariousness of our existence and our
desires in all their farcical aspects. We often see this in the comedic trope
that involves disguise, the phallic power prop par excellence, as Alenka
Zupančič develops in her contribution to this volume analyzing Genet’s
play, The Balcony. The play shows how donning a costume functions like a
prop making a symbolic identity consist. Related recurrent comedic
themes include permutations of errors – mistaken identities, crossing of
class and gender boundaries, and even transposition of time as in Mark
Twain’s humorous, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Robert
Zemeckis’ film, Back to the Future, and, of course, Woody Allen’s Sleeper.
In these comedies the heroes’ time-travel becomes a way to reflect on the
wonders and absurdity of the truths constructed by their own historical
moments, unveiling the “errors” that have been made into necessary
“facts” by any given time period. Reality has a phallic aspect that we are
often blind to that comedy allows us to see. We laugh when we see the
wool over our eyes, the wool that reveals and conceals the political power
and ideology that subtends it.
Comedy’s Power
As revealing the structure of power, comedy lets us subversively broach
serious political questions. It is its own form of power. In addition to its
theoretical richness in terms of analytic technique, Lacan will use satire and
humor to expose and make fun of the stultifying status quo of psycho-
analysis in the 1950s. He had recourse to Jonathan Swift’s ascerbic wit
when he considered the stagnation of what was taken for “knowledge” in
psychoanalytic institutes and practice. He quoted Swift’s biting sarcasm in
The Grand Mystery, or Art of Meditating over an House of Office, Restor’d
and Unveiled in which profound knowledge was ascertained by studying
the feces of man: knowledge comes from excrement. The eighteenth
century master of satire allowed Lacan a witty precedent for his own
humor and puns in his Ecrits text, “The Situation of the Psychoanalyst
in 1956,” a text that often adopts a sarcastic tone emulating moralist
philosopher Jean de la Bruyère’s satires that were inspired by Theophras-
tus, both authors dear to Lacan, and to the French comic tradition. Five
years later, Lacan again mentioned Swift, this time in his seminar on
transference (lesson of April 26, 1961), quoting at length Gulliver’s third
voyage, when he discovers the floating island of Laputa (whose name
means “whore” in Spanish and was meant to be a parodic allusion to
England’s oppression of Ireland). The use of Swift again allows Lacan to
comment on his world, in particular the post-colonial French predicament.
Lacan avowed in his seminar that he had lost sleep over concern that
he may have neglected the tragic dimension of the political turmoil of his
day. He quipped that the current events were not tragic but farcical. For
Lacan, satire is the most expedient form of comedy for understanding
and influencing political reality. As a satirist, Swift is known, after all, as a
champion of liberty.
Is comedy conservative, suspicious of change, as many including Hayden
White have argued? One could say that comedies have a life-affirming
quality that may be described as adaptive. After all, Molière averred that
“the duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.” This “correction”
is not a disciplinarian imperative but a freeing realization with transforma-
tive moral effects. Comedies have happy endings: the hero triumphs, the
couple marries, the dramatic tension is resolved, however equivocally.
Repeated obstacles may not be defeated but reality suffers an accommoda-
tion which rather than being simply complicit allows for further question-
ing; the hero finds a way around the inexorableness of law and the
absolutism of meaning. Indeed, the very nonsensical manner that many
comedies end allows us to appreciate, as Northrop Frye put it, “the action
of a comedy . . . is from law to liberty.”20
Notably, Henri Bergson and Mikhail Bakhtin have seen comedy as a
means of liberation. Likewise, Alenka Zupančič has eloquently elaborated
upon comedy’s great subversive force, what she considers a more powerful
political tool than tragedy.21 The tragic hero is, as Aristotle noted, some
kind of aristocrat or noble; the comic hero or anti-hero is the common
fellow. While tragedy focuses on the hero’s fall, comedy is for every little
guy treading water, trying to keep his head above the surface. In tragedy,
the hamartia (tragic flaw) results in catastrophe and death. In comedy,
the error is a blunder that does not cause pain in the audience but an
amusement that delights. Whether we think of the “Old Comedy” of
Aristophanes that used biting satire to expose the supercilious self-
importance of those in power, (influencing Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift
and even something as recent as Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove) or the “New
20
Herman Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957), 181.
21
Alenka Zupančič. The Odd One In: On Comedy (Short Circuits). (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2009).
Introduction 13
Comedy” of Menander that foregrounded the ridiculousness of everyday
life (influencing Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Congreve), who is at
center stage? Comedy celebrates the common man; comedy is democratic.
Since its inception in ancient Greece, comedy used blasphemy and
bawdy language to critique pompous oratory and oligarchic rule. Similarly,
in the contemporary American context, the most audacious political
commentaries are delivered in the daily news by comedians. Comedy
and its resulting laughter bypass the censorship of political correctness to
be truly political. Tragedy leaves us silent while comedy opens up conver-
sation. Democracy only exists with discussion, disagreement, and debate; it
is a form of government that is innately rhetorical. When Machiavelli
remarked that democracy was comedy as way to vilify it, we all know that
it is precisely comedy that makes democracy possible.
This democratic feature is found already in the etymology of the word
“comedy,” which, as we have seen, derives from the old Greek κῶμος kômos
(revel) or κώμη kō´mē (village) and ᾠδή ōidē´ (singing). Comedy started as
the shared revel of the village. Even when this ancient root’s meaning is no
longer heard in comedy since the word in its modern use is associated with
laughter, we nevertheless find echoes of the ancient meaning in recent
theorizations. Walter Benjamin referred to the subversive power of laughter
as “both the most international and the most revolutionary affect of the
masses.”22 For Benjamin, comedy’s revolutionary power works on the cusp
between laughter and horror. Comedy challenges, shatters, and disturbs.
Laughing stock
Does comedy, of necessity, remain on the side of what cannot be bound by
any master discourse? Walt Disney famously said that, “Laughter is Amer-
ica’s most important export.” This quotation raises the question of
whether laughter is just raw material for capital exploitation a commodifi-
able “laughing stock.” Can then laughter be regulated in a mimetic,
obedient response to an imposed ideology of happiness “at all costs” in
our “feel good” society, or is it as Benjamin argues always a form of
subversive critique? This controversial question has elicited an epistolary
debate between Adorno and Benjamin. In a letter to Benjamin, Adorno
criticizes Benjamin’s overestimation that “the laughter of the audience at a
cinema . . . is anything but good and revolutionary.” Adorno, referring to
22
Walter Benjamin, “Rübkblick auf Chaplin,” in Charlie Chaplin: Eine Ikone der Moderne. Edited by
Dorothee Kimmich. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 155
an opinion shared with Horkheimer, contended that the laughter in the
movie theater is “full of the worst bourgeois sadism.”23 Adorno questioned
the radical potential of the audience’s laughter; he saw it as mere escapism
and objected to Benjamin’s appropriation of cinema for the Left, consider-
ing Benjamin’s view a naive optimism that he ascribed to “anarchistic
romanticism.”24 This debate can be revisited when we consider the phe-
nomenon of canned laughter and America’s exportation of laughter. The
ethical difference between what we call “canned laughter” and “Lacan’s
laughter” lies in the particular effect of surprise and transformation; unlike
“canned” laughter, it cannot be produced or contained on demand.
Spontaneous laughter rather exposes the aleatory nature of the logos at
work in ideology. In the modicum of freedom provided by laughter’s
impromptu punctuation, the laughter that comedy, and for that matter,
a timely psychoanalytic interpretation sparks, has the potential to create
new meanings and new levels of nonsense.
So, when Groucho Marx in Duck Soup says, “Pick a number from one
to ten,” and the answer is “eleven,” he can go on perfectly well exclaiming,
“Right!” Not having gotten the response he asks for, the answer is never-
theless “Right” because what one asks for is never what one wants, and
comedy knows it. There is an ethics and freedom in the idiosyncratic style
of one’s own desire and the way life answers to one’s demands. One lesson
of psychoanalysis is that desire always exceeds the limitations of any
articulated demand. Since demands are articulated in language, excess
and discrepancy are structurally introduced. What one wants and what
one asks for are not the same thing. This discrepancy is beautifully
illustrated in Nanni Moretti’s film The Son’s Room in a scene in which a
cantankerous female patient berates the thoughtfully benign psychoanalyst
played by Moretti, for his equanimity. We hear his inner thoughts. He
surmises that he had failed and feels badly. Aware that he did not do a
good job, and making a very sad face, he assumes that the treatment is
over. At this point, the patient suddenly blurts out gratefully, “I feel much
better!” We can be sure that she will come back to her next session. The
motivations for this incongruent exchange, not devoid of comedy, are
beyond the limits of the analyst’s and the analysand’s awareness, but the
odd interaction manages to produce something transformative for both.
23
Theodor Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch,
Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verson, 1980), 123.
24
Ibid.
Introduction 15
The laughing cure

Laughter has long been known to have salutary effects – “A laughing heart
does good, like medicine.” King Solomon the Wise had already noted the
medicinal aspect of laughter ages ago. This is just as evident in the work of
an analytic cure where, due to the equivocal nature of the wording of
symptoms, a witticism can emerge with salutary clinical effects. The
analysand makes a transition via laughter from tragedy to comedy, from
death (the end of the world) to life (failing better). We can clearly see the
efficacy of linguistic equivocation in the comic and liberating effects of the
following clinical interventions. We note that laughter is not a panacea or a
placebo. When King Solomon says it is a medicine, he means this in the
sense of a cure, and not as an pain killer – it hurts when you laugh. As the
British comedian Trevor Griffiths wrote, “Comedy is medicine. Not
colored sweeties to rot [one’s] teeth with.”25
A female hysteric patient dreams that her childhood dog, a cocker
spaniel, is missing its paw. In the dream, she notices that the paw is
present, but not easily visible because it is bent backwards. Forlorn, she
says, “You couldn’t see it, but it was there, it’s like her paw was absent.”
The analyst repeats simply, “Her paw was absent,” and ends the session.
Walking out the door, the analysand bursts out laughing hearing the
equivocation between paw and pa. Indeed, for her, pa (father) was there,
but absent. The fact that she could laugh showed a fall in identifications –
the pathos lifted; she no longer believed that the dog was actually wounded
nor that her father was absent. Another analysand, this time a young shy
male, shared a dream-fragment early on in the treatment. He recalled “an
awesome magical motorcycle,” which belonged to his father. It was made
out of the “most precious sparkling stainless steel.” The analyst asked:
“What comes to mind with the word ‘steel’?” He paused and exclaimed in
a startled tone: “How did you know that I steal? The last thing I would
admit to is my shoplifting habit.” The chuckle of a new awareness of this
“stainless steal cycle” followed. Another patient, this time an obsessive
neurotic middle-aged wealthy businessman, overwhelmed with having to
placate several adoring mistresses, and to whom, due to his financial
success, nobody ever said no, complained to his psychoanalyst: “I just
want to be left alone. I want to sit in my room and read a philosopher.”
“Which philosopher would you like to read?” the psychoanalyst asked.
“Adorno,” he replied. The psychoanalyst stood up, pointed to the office
25
Trevor Griffiths, The Comedians (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 23.
door, and opening it, gestured for him to leave, remarking, “Adore, no.”
The analysand gasped in surprise as he walked out. A few seconds later, the
psychoanalyst heard him walking down the hall, laughing. “Adore no! Of
course . . .”
Lacan on laughter – a new kind of LOL

The previous clinical examples show us that psychoanalytic practice is a
serious but not solemn endeavor. As Lacan noted, comedy “unmasks
desire”26; this revelation of our subjective division is “the essence of
comedy.”27 As we have seen, whenever the unconscious reveals itself, there
is an effect of surprise both for the analysand and for the analyst. The
absurd suddenly comes to light. There may be embarrassment, pleasure, or
even laughter. The analysand can go on his way making do with castration.
Comedy’s mission is not to laugh at the truth but rather “to make truth
laugh,” as Umberto Eco put it.28 Since the work of psychoanalysis is aimed
at revealing subjective truth, it follows that psychoanalytic practice has a
comical dimension. Eco aptly exemplifies the subversive power of comedy
which allows us to be free from our ghosts and laugh at our passion for
truth. In a psychoanalysis, one may learn to let one’s most solemn and
secret truths laugh and thus acquire a modicum of freedom.
Lacan famously proposed that the unconscious is structured like a
language; one can claim that the unconscious itself is structured like a
joke. Lacan, influenced by Jakobson, would add a linguistic turn, reformu-
lating Freud’s mechanisms of condensation and displacement in terms of
metaphor and metonymy. The snickers and giggles that follow a joke or an
interpretation show that repression has lifted. Laughter is the sign of a
momentary enjoyment of one’s unconscious. Laughter, as Bataille has
shown, can be the reverse of anxiety, the mark of excess or relief. The
punch line, like an apt interpretation, allows us to exit imaginary stasis. It
is therefore on the side of desire and subjectivity.
Of necessity, the analysand, like a good comedian, never speaks the
truth fully or directly but only obliquely. in symptoms the repressed
manifests itself by never stopping, always returning, repeating the same.
Lacan illustrated this point referring to Lewis Carroll’s ingenious invention
26
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation (Paris, Le Seuil, 2013), 488.
27
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1978, 5.
28
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Mariner, 2014), 527.
Introduction 17
of the Cheshire cat. The persistent grin of Alice’s Cheshire cat, the “grin
without a cat,” shows that even when the body dissolves, something
indestructible is left as a remainder. This grinning grimace reveals the
Lacanian Real, a beyond speech and understanding that uncannily insists.
As we have seen, in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, while
theorizing Das Ding (the Thing), a primordial real at the limit of language,
Lacan referred to the perplexing face of Harpo. He asked: “Is there
anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more
absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust
everything that takes place into an abyss or void than that face of Harpo
Marx, that face with its smile which leaves unclear as to whether it signifies
the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity?” 29 Lacan described
Harpo’s silent smile as one that leaves us stymied, baffled, not knowing if
Harpo is perversely enjoying our confusion or totally oblivious to his
uncanny effect. Here, Lacan’s ideas about humor go beyond Freud’s, never
ending up in a new meaning, but tenaciously and marvelously reminding
us of the limits of meaning. Another lesson taught in the wonderland of
psychoanalysis is that laughing in the face of the impossible allows the
human comedy to continue.
Lacan.com-edy
Jokes and the comic have not received nearly as much consideration as
they deserve given the fundamental role they play in our psychic life and
the way they unite the fields of aesthetics, literature, and psychoanalysis.
Our collection addresses this lack and opens up the discussion.
This volume is organized thematically in two sections followed by an
epilogue. The first section, “The laughing cure,” comprises essays on the
salubrious nature of laughter in the Bible, philosophy, jokes, and clinical
work. The second section, “Comedy on the couch,” concerns psychoana-
lytic readings of canonical comedic and satirical literary forms. The epi-
logue, “He who laughs last, laughs last,” juxtaposes the traditional creation
ex nihilo as the impetus of art, with a joke told again and again and again,
proving as Woody Allen did that “comedy is tragedy . . . plus time.”
Manya Steinkoler opens the collection going back to the beginning. In
“Sarah’s laughter: where babies and humor come from” she reflects on how
Sarah’s laughter in the book of Genesis is related to feminine enjoyment
and the mysteries of pregnancy, fertility, and sexual reproduction. It is not
29
Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 55.
God’s power that makes the 90-year-old matriarch pregnant but rather His
bad timing. Sarah’s laugh binds the birth of the nation of Israel to the
future of laughter, suggesting a far more ancient origin for Jewish humor.
In Chapter 2, “Psychoanalysis as gai saber: towards a new episteme of
laughter,” Dany Nobus offers an exploration of Lacan as a comic, provoca-
tively asserting that he was “gay,” in the exuberant polysemy of this term.
Nobus shows the role of joy in Lacan’s games with knowledge tracing
the word “gay” from the troubadours to Emerson, Nietzsche, and Parisian
masqued balls. Psychoanalytic practice turns out to be an alliance of
laughter and wisdom following Lacan’s assertion that “gay savoir” is a
virtue situating gaiety as an affect on the side of ethics.
In the third chapter, we gain a greater appreciation for the place of
laughter in front of subjective loss. In “Laughing about nothing: Democri-
tus and Lacan,” Patricia Gherovici revisits the laughing philosopher Dem-
ocritus’ theories in light of Lacan’s notion of the unattainable object cause
of desire: the object a, a symbol of lack imagined as separable from the
body, like an organ that falls. A clinical vignette shows how laughter lifts
the paranoia of racism, transforming the jouissance of hatred into tolerance
of small differences. The therapeutic use of laughter predicates nothing-
ness, opening up a space to free the patient from symptoms.
The vicissitudes of the object are always a question of economics. Moving
from philosophy to economics, in Chapter 4, “The surplus jouissance of the
joke: from Freud to Lacan,” Marcel Drach offers a critical overview of
Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of jokes and humor. Recourse to Jakobson’s
linguistic theory allows Drach’s focus to be at once economic and poetic.
Drach demonstrates that the civilizing function of the joke entails a sublim-
ation of the body’s jouissance.
Further disentangling the libidinal economy of jokes, the next chapter,
“Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on the economy of jokes”
further theorizes the thrift in the joke and the surplus-value of laughter.
Jean-Michel Rabaté’s scholarly overview articulates a complex relation
between philosophy, economics, psychoanalysis, literature, and laughter by
way of Marx (Karl and Groucho), Gide, Freud, Lacan, Ferenczi, Benjamin,
Rank, Joyce, Beckett, among others. Rabaté argues that the unconscious is a
capitalist and that humor is a kind of labor.
The labor of clinical work is taken up in a case discussion by Jamieson
Webster where laughter and joke-telling play a curative role. In Chapter 6,
“Mother pumper and the analyst’s donuts,” Webster poses the questions:
When is laughter constructive and when is it defensively maintaining the
status quo? What do laughter and humor add to aggression that makes it
Introduction 19
differ from aggression as such? The case of an agoraphobic teenage boy
trapped in an eroticized co-dependant relation with his mother, makes use
of dreams, the comic, aggression, laughter, and the body to shed new light
on these questions.
How does humor work when treating a patient who is humorless? In
Chapter 7, Carol Owens, “Not in the humor: bulimic dreams” examines
the absence of humor in the trope of “anhedonia” using the films Annie
Hall and Synecdoche New York. In connection with the ancient theory and
practice of humoralism, “humor” links wellbeing with excess, as phlegm,
bile, blood, vomit, toxins which must be drained away from the body.
Owens examines two dreams from a melancholic patient, who regularly
drains herself of “humors” – cutting herself and vomiting – allowing us to
catch a glimpse of obscene superego functioning as it is coordinated with
law, pleasure, and jouissance.
In Part II of this volume, we move from the private theater of uncon-
scious comedy to the literary stage. The essays in “Comedy on the couch”
deal directly with literary comedy from Shakespeare through Genet. In
“Comedy and the Agency of the Letter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”
Matthew Sharpe proposes that the elementary starting point of comedy
involves the metonymic operation of language as Lacan describes it.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns on how the play’s couples, which by
“nature” or natural inclination “should” be together, are magically
uncoupled. Sharpe suggests that the mercurial Puck plays with the drive
and that this is his magic power. This power reaches into the erotic being
of all men and women, rendering our subjectivity and desire innately
comical.
In “Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy: Measure for Measure after Žižek’s
Lacanian dialectics,” Geoff Boucher examines the historical context of
the origins of tragicomedy using Žižek as a guide. With recourse to the
Lacanian formulation of the “non-existence of the Other” and the crisis of
symbolic authority, Shakespeare’s play functions as a way to critique moral
absolutism. Boucher shows how comedy, and in particular tragicomedy,
opens the door to our modern moment. The very symbolic gap that allows
for the birth of tragicomedy can also permit the most elaborate and
erotically delectable of comedic misunderstandings.
Further exploring the relation between language and the comedy of the
sexes, Molly Rothenberg’s “Jane Austen’s wit-craft” takes up the literary
tradition of “wit” from English restoration drama through Fanny Burney’s
Evelina to Jane Austen’s Emma. Using Lacanian theory, she explains that
the tradition of British literary wit can be understood in Lacanian terms as
a relation of the subject of the signifier with the specificity of a Mőbius
structure granting simultaneous identification and dis-identification. Like
Groucho, the subject does not want to be a member of a club that would
accept her. Emma’s failure of wit will make her a comic object, allowing
her to change social and subjective positions. Rothenberg shows how wit
becomes an encounter with both the singular and the universal in Austen’s
comedy of manners, an encounter with social and political consequences.
Comedy intervenes in sexual politics in Henry James’s 1908 short story,
“The Chaperon,” and Chapter 11, Sigi Jöttkandt’s “The perambulatory
process: Eros, wit and society-testing in Henry James’ ‘The Chaperon’”
exploits the similar function of jokes and dreams in revealing the oper-
ations of the unconscious. In James’ story, the hidden idea is that women,
like men, are sexual beings and that “marriage is not an arrangement
calculated to satisfy [either gender’s] sexuality.”30 It transpires that
following the social code to the letter threatens to uncover the distance
between what a society officially says and what everyone knows about what
women want. Jöttkandt’s reading of James highlights that, as Lacan notes,
it is in comedy rather than tragedy that we find the paradigm for love and
sexuality.
Mapping the farcical function of the phallus in subtending power and
ideology, in the last chapter, Alenka Zupančič’s “Power in the closet: and
its coming out,” follows Lacan and Badiou’s theorizations of comedy that
reveal the phallus as a prop and political tool, key to understanding Jean
Genet’s satire of sex, prostitution, politics, and revolution, The Balcony.
Zupančič shows that the drama of the play is the drama of the comic
phallus, as it critiques all the while maintaining the political power
structure. The discussion allows her to analyze Lars Von Trier’s early
comedy, The Boss, and thus see the economic and political implications
of the structure of phallic power in our contemporary moment as a kind
of joke.
Simon Critchley’s epilogue, “Repetition, repetition, repetition: Richard
Prince and the three r’s,” closes our volume with an appreciation for the
importance of repetition in comedy, in the works of American painter and
photographer Richard Prince. Reflecting on illusion and authenticity in
Prince’s work, and on comedy through the works of Bergson, Baudelaire,
Joyce, Beckett, Tom McCarthy, and even Yogi Bear, Wile E. Coyote and
30
Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 8, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth
Press, 1959), 111.
Introduction 21
Sylvester the Cat, Critchley develops the notion of “repetition with a
difference” as leading to a disturbing, beautiful, and humorous sense of
the Uncanny, humor with a twist, that is, when the joke is on us.
Events like the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris reminds us of the
timeliness of a serious discussion of the power and effects of humor. We
know that comedy is not all funny business. We are charged with the work
of thinking about comedy today and elaborating upon its ethics and the
problematics of representation. We hope that our book can contribute to
this urgent communal endeavor.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor. “Letter to Walter Benjamin.” In Aesthetics and Politics: Debates
between Bloch, Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno. Edited by Ronald Taylor.
London: Verso, 1980, 123–124.
Benjamin, Walter. “Rübkblick auf Chaplin.” In Charlie Chaplin: Eine Ikone der
Moderne. Edited by Dorothee Kimmich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2003, 153–155.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams: In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 4 & 5. Translated by
James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 8. Translated by James
Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
Frye, Herman Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957.
Griffiths, Trevor. The Comedians. London: Faber & Faber, 1976.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978.
On Feminine Sexuality. Edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982.
Le Séminaire. Livre VIII: Le transfert 1960–1961. Paris: Seuil, 1991.
The Seminar. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Sylvana
Tomaselli. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller. Paris: du Seuil, 1998
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: On the Limits of Love and Knowledge,
1972–1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New
Le Séminaire. Livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation. Paris, Le Seuil, 2013.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: On Anxiety 1962–1963. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
Le Séminaire XXII: R.S.I. 1974–75. Unpublished papers.
Le Séminaire XV: Moment de Conclure. 1977–1978. Unpublished papers.
part i
The laughing cure
chapter 1
Sarah’s laughter
Where babies and humor come from
Manya Steinkoler
The biblical account of Sarah’s motherhood is usually understood to be a

story that serves to demonstrate and glorify Yahweh’s omnipotence. Just as
the Garden of Eden story tries to separate woman from her idolatrous
partner, the snake, so the stories of the barren matriarchs show that it is
Yahweh who gives women babies; it is the promise of Yahweh, the Bible
tells us, that has power over the female body, not the workings of any
actual male organ. One aim of the stories was to make the Yahweh religion
attractive to the ancient woman whose social power was solely based on her
ability to bear children. So powerful is the God of Abraham, we learn from
this story, He can even make a woman of ninety years old give birth. Well,
ladies, we had better worship that God right away, now, shouldn’t we?
Today, I will suggest an alternative reading of the biblical text, one more
Lacanian and far more in line with a close reading of the very rich and
suggestive ancient Hebrew. My thesis purports the very opposite of the
traditional reading; namely that Sarah was able to have a baby not because
of Yahweh’s omnipotence, but because Yahweh’s omnipotence was shown
to be incomplete – Sarah’s famous laughter being the proof. In this
reading, Yahweh’s power can only assist in making women pregnant
insofar as He, and what He says, can be laughed at. Sarah’s laughter
showed that the great Abrahamic covenant with God – made by God with
Abraham – the promise of a multitudinous nation that would fill the
earth – and the one that Sarah was supposed to help fulfill by having a
baby – (whose birth the reader of the story waits several chapters for in
suspense) – for just a moment at least – was funny.
Freud explains that the joke liberates an inhibition requiring a “psychical
expenditure,” that the joke is able to free up. In this case, the psychical
expenditure is Sarah’s barrenness; the freeing punch line is marked by the
laughter/baby (Isaac). I remind those who are not familiar with the Old
Testament that Isaac means laughter in Hebrew. The child is named in
memory of his mother’s laughter, a remarkable nomination in its relation to
25
26 manya steinkoler
the laughing female body. The barrenness of Sarah had concerned the
fullness of the Other, the weight of the “meaning” of the covenant she
would have to help fulfill. We recall that one pleasure Freud tells us that the
joke offers is that of nonsense. In such a reading, the covenant had to have
less meaning for the baby to be born; there had to be a little nonsense in this
hallowed and heavy world-historical story of “meaning.” After all, who
could possibly give birth when the future of God’s chosen people depended
on it? Who could possibly give birth when it would be “proof” of God’s
power? Such meaning would make anyone barren.
In Seminar V, Lacan says that nothing of the demand can be reached
once we have entered the Symbolic and he uses the joke to demonstrate
this point. Like Achilles in Zeno’s paradox, man is destined never to catch
up to the tortoise, relegated as he is to discursivity. The originality of
Lacan’s point is that it turns the issue of castration away from the question
of whether or not the subject has the phallus toward the issue of whether
the Other does or does not have it. It is the Other who lacks; it is the
Other who is incomplete, written as the Other who is castrated: written in
the Lacanian matheme, S(Ⱥ). The story of the birth of Isaac shows that
reproductive power, meaning, transmission, and sexual reproduction itself
is intimately tied to castration, not to absolute power of a big Other. Said
differently, the biblical story allies sexual reproduction with the power of
the signifier being Not All and is demonstrated by Sarah’s laughter. Sarah’s
laughter is the sign the Other lacks. This makes jouissance possible; it is a
mark of this jouissance itself, and the narrative unequivocally shows Isaac’s
birth as related to her jouissance. Perhaps one can only get pregnant if one
cracks up a bit. Lacan tells us in Seminar XX that Feminine jouissance is
defined by an “outside of anatomy,” a “supplementary jouissance,”1
“beyond the phallus.”2
The answer to the question: where do babies come from, then, is Sarah’s
laughter, a response to the incompleteness of the Other. We note that the
genealogical history of the children of Israel, the fulfillment of the Abrahamic
covenant, the transmission of the covenant from generation to generation is
intimately and originarily tied to laughter.
Jewish humor might have a far more ancient history than Freud thought.
The birth of Isaac marks God’s initial fulfillment of His part of the
covenant. Just prior to Isaac’s birth, in Genesis 17, Avram becomes Avraham,
1
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XX. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge,
trans. Bruce Fink and ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), 56.
2
Ibid., 69.
Sarah’s laughter: Where babies and humor come from 27
and Sara becomes Sarah in the passage wherein God reiterates the covenant,
and Abraham is told he will be the father of a mighty nation and that he must
circumcise himself and Ishmael, his son by Hagar. In his book, On Humor,
Simon Critchley has rather cleverly read that the added “H” in the parents’
names is the “haha” of Yitzhak (Isaac, laughter). But, unfortunately, not a
reader of Hebrew, Prof. Critchley has failed to realize that the letter “hey” is not
the same as the Hebrew “chet” (in yitzchak). It is nevertheless fruitful to notice
this name change as taking place just prior to the birth of Isaac. Importantly,
the “H” in Hebrew has no vowel; it has no sound. It is an addition of pure
breath and as such indicative of the Ruach or breath that is associated with
God from Genesis through later translated as the Greek agion pneuvma and
the Latin spiritus. That the Divine is associated with breath (and with
breathing into Adam’s mouth in Genesis 2) associates God with the first
Other that is not the mother – air. Furthermore, as air, the “silent H” touches
on the unrepresentable and the unpronounceable of the Name of the Divine;
it has no sound. We might say that the “H” shows that the power of the word
is not signifiable by the word, except insofar as it is said (or in the Lacanian
formulation, that there is no meta-language). Unlike the voice, the “H” is
pure breath; it is not an “object.” The H is thus an addition to the names of
the patriarch and matriarch that has no phonation of its own, and no
representation of its own; its function is only to show that words, like laughter,
are made of and with air. In Genesis 17, with the reiteration of the covenant,
the letter “Hey” is added in the name, as flesh is subtracted in the circumcision
performed, while a son is promised to Abraham with Sarah. This is the third
time we have read of this promise in the Biblical text; here, however, the “H”
is added and Abraham and Ishmael are finally circumcised; with the addition
of the letter “hey,” the story begins to move forward, now that the link
between generations is tied to the power of the word, to breath, and to
circumcision. Berit milah, circumcision, means (literally in Hebrew) “the
covenant of the word.” This subtraction of the flesh literally marks the power
of the signifier as does the addition of the letter “Hey” to the name. Promise,
the covenant itself, is made synonymous with lack marked on the male organ,
and the silent addition reminiscent of the presence of God as the breath that
supports the word in the name. For the birth of this son and this promise of
generations to be fulfilled, lack has to be installed at the level of the body. This
lack concerns Abraham’s body – the male body. Abraham has to be lacking
phallically. For Abraham, Isaac (laughter) is the name of this lack of the
phallus, or the phallus as lacking. Recall that (Yitzhak) Isaac is the only
patriarch whose name is not changed. Abraham had been Abram, and Isaac’s
son Yaakov will become Israel after his wrestling with the angel. Quite literally
28 manya steinkoler
then, Laughter is the father of Israel (Jacob). In my reading, Isaac’s name,
“Laughter,” is the carrier of the initial inscription of sexual difference and
phallic lack. This is precisely why Isaac doesn’t need his name changed.
Judaism is the religion that marks the power of signifier, ceaselessly
underlining the power of the signifier over the body and nature. As a direct
consequence, it is the religion that gives birth to history, a history fundamen-
tally distinct, as the Egyptologist Jan Assman has pointed out in his work,3
from the timelessness of Egypt. Besides the obvious fact that Egyptian
timelessness is not very funny, we see the idea of laughter in terms of a
marking of time in the Genesis story. Laughter punctuates. Laughter is a cut
into time and meaning, and into the seriousness of the grand narrative of
Yahweh and Israel. As such, it is the name of the first born of Abraham, of the
beginning of the covenant fulfilled, and the end of Sarah’s barrenness.
And what of Sarah’s laughter? What body and what castration is
involved there? I turn to the Biblical text:
In Genesis 17 God reiterates his covenant with Abraham, and Abraham is
told he will the father of a Great Nation:
17 Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart:
‘Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah,
that is ninety years old, bear?’. . .
19 And God said: ‘Nay, but Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son; and thou
shalt call his name Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him for an
everlasting covenant for his seed after him.’4
Well before Sarah laughs, Abraham laughs at God’s news, and God – marking
Abraham’s laughter – pronounces “Laughter” as name of the promised son.
Hearing from God that he would finally become a father at 100 years old, and
that his wife would have a baby at ninety, Abraham fell on his face laughing.
We could call Abraham’s laughter and his “falling” an instance of the
detumescence of Abraham as the phallus. Abraham had to be de-phallicized
in order to have a child; that is why narratively, this falling laughter happens
contiguously with the circumcision. Then, as a signifier of this “falling”
(the Lacanian minus phi) the word is recuperated by God in the name of
the promised child. Here, “laughter,” – Abraham’s laughter – is concordant
with phallic jouissance as detumescence – both as that of the penis and as
belonging to the signifier. The phallus falls; the falling of the phallus is funny.
3
See Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Ancient Egypt in Western Monotheism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
4
All Bible citations are from the Sapirstein edition. See Works cited.
It is the origin of the comic and it is recuperated in the signifier of the son’s
name. Judaism and Jewish humor are birthed at the same time.
For Abraham the punch line was clearly phallic, illustrated in his falling
down. We are reminded that the word for punch line in French is “chute”
(fall); and we can even think here of the Freudian einfallen – the work of free
association, of the psychoanalytic cure itself, and the fall of the free association
on the Real as what cannot stop not being written. In Abraham’s case, God
seizes on the verb and resuscitates it as a privileged signifier, recuperating
Abraham’s fall into his son’s name. Lacan says in Seminar V that in the
preparation of the joke, what Freud calls “the set up,” we have the establishing
of imaginary stasis. The joke is being set up a certain way – a meaning is
expected. Meaning is expected in the birth of Abraham’s son – the son we are
all waiting for, the promised son.5 Meaning has been fixed. God Himself has
pronounced it. In the set up of the joke, you think you know where the joke is
going; you are “buying the story” in its accepted meaning. In this seminar,
Lacan tells us that the laugh is always a question of the “liberation of the
image,” in the case of the joke, a surprise, a liberation from what is expected.
In the Biblical story we see that Abraham, the destroyer of images, must
also himself be destroyed as an image in order to have a child; this is true of
the circumcision that accompanies the announcement of the covenant and
of the Akeda on Mt. Moriah which will follow.
Sarah’s laughter is quite a different story.
Gen. 18: 12 ‫ ואדני זקן‬,‫לי עדנה‬-‫ אחרי בלתי היתה‬:‫ בקרבה לאמר‬,‫ותצחק שרה‬
And Sarah laughed within herself, saying: ‘After I am waxed old shall I have
pleasure, my lord being old also?’
We note first that Sarah laughs at the idea that she will have any pleasure at her
age and that her aged husband will give her pleasure. Importantly, the laughter
in this passage does not concern babies; it specifically concerns sexual pleasure,
jouissance. The Hebrew word “Edena” (translated as pleasure) has the same
root as Eden or paradise.
13‫ האף אמנם אלד–ואני זקנתי‬,‫ למה זה צחקה שרה לאמר‬:‫אברהם‬-‫ אל‬,‫ויאמר יהוה‬
13 And the LORD said unto Abraham: ‘Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying:
Shall I of a surety bear a child, who am old?’
We notice two important facts here: first, we note the blatant difference
between what Sarah said and what God said Sarah said when He speaks
5
The fact that we are waiting for a promised son has set up the very structure of the three
monotheisms, not to mention the many years spent in analysis of many analysands.
30 manya steinkoler
about it to Abraham. Sarah laughed wondering whether pleasure was
possible for her. Sarah’s question points to Abraham’s ability to give her
pleasure and of her ability to have it; it does not concern having a child. But
Yahweh rewords this when speaking to Abraham as if it concerned a doubt
about Yahweh’s power to give Sarah a child and her ability to bear it.6
Yahweh thus erases Sarah’s comment about pleasure and replaces it with
the (supposed) pleasure of child bearing. He transforms her laughter about
possible sexual pleasure, into one that questions His power to guarantee
the promised child’s birth.
The second important thing to notice in the passage is that God asks
Abraham about Sarah’s laughter; he does not address Sarah herself. Why?
14 Is anything too hard for the LORD? [No pun is intended in the Hebrew
text; the verb means more literally: is there anything too miraculous/secretive for
the Lord?] At the set time I will return unto thee, when the season cometh
round, and Sarah shall have a son.
The rabbinical comment on the fact that God seems (at least in their view) to
reprimand Sarah for her laughter is considerable and extended. Rashi and
Onkelos7 tell us that Abraham’s laugh was joyous, whereas Sarah’s laugh was
“a form of sneering at the Lord.” They interpret that God, by speaking to
Abraham, was telling him to control his wife and her supposed mockery of
God’s power. Apparently, the rabbis read their own phallic anxiety onto
Sarah’s laughter identifying with Abraham and foreclosing (as God and
Abraham did) the question and anxiety with regard to feminine jouissance.
The question of jouissance (Edena) becomes transformed by Yahweh into a
question about having a child; a child is a phallic “answer” posed to a
perceived demand about sexual pleasure. In the text – as we saw in verse
17 – it is specifically Abraham who questions God’s power not Sarah. He is the
one who asked God whether a child would be born to an old couple
immediately after God informs him of it. Abraham is the one who questions
God. It is Abraham who needs at least one Other to be “not castrated” so that
he can bear being castrated himself. Sarah, on the contrary, never said a word
about God’s power! Yet all the Midrash concurs that she was the one who
doubted it! What is clear in the passage is that Yahweh tells Abraham that
Sarah shouldn’t doubt his power. And interestingly, He asks Abraham why
(Lamah) Sarah laughed – like God doesn’t know why she laughed? In
6
The Talmud comments on this difference. The school of Rabbi Yishmael taught that God was trying
to “keep the peace between the couple,” by not mentioning Sarah’s questioning Abraham’s age.
(Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia, 87a)
7
See chapter 24 in The Torah with Rashi’s Commentary, Sapirstein edition.
response to his own question, what God asks Abraham – “Why did Sarah
laugh” – Sarah already told us why (she made it quite clear – the idea that her
aged husband would be able to give her and she would be able to have sexual
pleasure, jouissance) – God assures Abraham – not Sarah – that the Almighty
One is powerful and can give her a child. He assures Abraham because it is
Abraham who needs the assurance.
Before continuing, it is important to discuss the setting of this “annun-
ciation scene,” the first of several biblical annunciation scenes. A birth will
take place in a story as part of a promise, announced significantly, by one
of Abraham’s three tent guests. Already a baby that is produced by way of a
prophesy, by way of language, shows something of a “taming” of the drive
by way of culture. The Israelites will be promised that birth will take place
inside a story, as part of their story, as contiguous with their story, as part
of history itself, part of a guarantee, of a covenant – not as an accident.
Birth, history, and narrative are simultaneously and sweepingly guaranteed
as the woman’s question of jouissance is divinely erased. The author(s) of
the Genesis text allowed the question of feminine jouissance to appear in
order to reveal the narrative aim: to change the question of feminine
jouissance to one that can be answered by childbirth and for that, child-
birth is effectively denaturalized, a primary aim of the Patriarchal narra-
tives. For the Abrahamic line, babies are born by way of the power of
Yahweh, inside of a story, not by sex alone. This is the principle reason
Abraham and Sarah must be beyond childbearing age, namely to empha-
size the non-natural, i.e., the signifier and the promise in childbirth.
In this scene, Abraham is visited in his tent by three men. It is a famous
scene in the Bible denoting the mitzvah of hachnasat orechim/(hospitality).
Recall that in Genesis 19, Lot offers his daughters at the “door” of his house to
his two visitors. Hospitality, the door, and the offering of the woman is part of
the customs of the ancient world. The topos of the tent opening appears several
times in the bible. In Samuel 1:22 Eli’s sons sleep with the women at the
entrance to the tent of meeting. In Exodus 28, we learn of women who work
at the entrance to the tent of meeting. There is even some suggestion that such
women were temple prostitutes. The opening of the tent is a reference to the
topos of the home and to the feminine body, the heim.
In this scene, one of the visitors tells Abraham that Sarah will have a
child and that when he returns in a year, the baby will be born. Interest-
ingly, the guest speaking to Abraham, and the figure of Yahweh are
indistinct from each other. The text reads: “God says” but, immediately
following, Abraham responds to the visitor in his tent, not to God. The
visitor is thus textually elided with Yahweh. I have pointed out in an earlier
32 manya steinkoler
article on biblical annunciation narratives8 how the Divine and human are
always confused in annunciation scenes and how all annunciation scenes
involve the barrenness of a woman and the appearance of a third party
(man, angel or God). As in the scenes of the birth of Samson and Samuel,
there is another “man” present who “announces” the birth; there is always
“another man” (as well as God) present and speaking when a “barren”
woman is made fertile. In this particular story, the importance of the
“third” is further underscored in the presence of three visitors to the tent.
Sarah overhears the story told to her husband at the tent entrance and she
laughs – contemplating the possibility of sexual pleasure so late in life.
She overhears the dialogue between Abraham and the third party thus two
times. Here, what is important is that it is Sarah’s ear that is highlighted at
the tent opening. In this birth story, there are two times that Sarah is caught
overhearing; the first is when she overhears the announcement that she will
bear a child at ninety years old while at the door of the tent, and the second is
when she overhears God telling Abraham that she laughed questioning His
power. The text foregrounds Sarah’s overhearing the announcement of the
“power” of the Other, of the Other’s decree about her body, or about “why”
she laughed. The ear at the opening, as the “way” to Sarah’s body effectively
resituates the place of Sarah’s jouissance – something enters through the ear – the
opening for Sarah is the field of listening and speech.
15 Then Sarah denied, saying: ‘I laughed not’; for she was afraid. And He
said: ‘Nay; but thou didst laugh.’
We have underlined the enormous difference between the laughter of Abra-
ham and Sarah. The rabbis state that Sarah’s laughter was a mockery of God,
and that is why God reprimanded her. They see Yahweh’s “but you laughed”
as His reprimand to what they interpret as her doubtful sneer. Why does God
insist that Sarah laughed? Why does God – who presumably knows every-
thing – even bother to comment on Sarah’s laughter? “But you laughed!” God
darts back at her. Why does the omnipotent, omniscient Almighty have to tell
Sarah that she laughed – especially if she did laugh? Why does Sarah deny it?
First, as we have pointed out, Sarah does not laugh about what God said
she laughed about. She never said that God is not powerful enough to give
her a baby. Significantly, Sarah’s laughter – unlike Abraham’s – causes
God to comment on it twice – first to change the reason for it, “reporting
8
See Manya Steinkoler “Biblical Annunciation Narratives: The Ethics of the Series and the Jouissance
of the End,” in International Journal of Lacanian Studies 5.1, ed. Dany Nobus (London: Karnac
Books, 2007).
it” to Abraham – and second, to insist that it, in fact, took place. God is
forced to say “But you did! You did laugh!” Unlike Abraham who falls on
the floor, Sarah’s laughter does not go without God’s saying. God had to insist
on it – further indicating its ambiguous status. Sarah’s laughter shows that
the Big Other is Not All – and that feminine jouissance concerns this
position. The fact that the God of Abraham had to say, “Yes you did!” to
Sarah’s laughter – now that is funny!
Did she or didn’t she – laugh? God’s insistence suggests He wasn’t quite
sure. Sarah’s laughter shows that the universality of the phallic order is a
pretension that is already flawed. And so it was that laughing, she could
conceive. Yahweh’s insistence on Sarah’s laughter marks his lack of power.
It is not Abraham whose castration is at issue for Sarah, it is God’s. God
could only have to say “but you laughed” because it needed to be said,
because it was not in the field of saying. Yahweh is the aumoinsun-homme-
moinzun9 – the Oh! moins un – the “O men sent” and the “omen sent” –
the one not marked by castration who has to know and not know about
feminine jouissance. “But you laughed!” Well, she did. . .and. . .so what?
The “O man” had to say it, didn’t he?
The child “Laughter” is born both as minus phi. Laughter/Isaac is both
the mark of Abraham’s fall – and the signifier of lack in the Other, of
Sarah’s laughter, the beginning of the genealogy of Abraham.
The question of femininity can only be posed where the phallic function
meets its limit – laughter – where God has to tell us whether she laughed or not.
Feminine jouissance is related to the birth of Isaac/the birth of laughter – in
showing Yahweh’s lack, in showing saying’s lack, in showing knowledge’s lack.
The Punch Line:
“Yitzhak,” the infinitive of the Hebrew verb “to laugh,” according to the
rabbis, suggests that laughter is something to repress or something prob-
lematic. In this conjugation the verb appears 13 times in the Old Testa-
ment10 often with something unsavory at stake in the laughter (The
Philistines and Samson, Lot and his sons, etc.). The verb is in its Kal form
(the “easy” verb case) “Tsehok,” on the other hand – what Sarah says God
9
The “hommoinzun” is Lacan’s neologism meaning “at least one” (man who is not castrated) and
“there is at least one man” who is not castrated. It is a logical consequence in the Lacanian chart of
sexuation. Men are “men” insofar as they are castrated, and therefore there exists one man who is
not castrated, what Freud would have called the UrVater or the Father of the horde. I further pun
on Lacan’s polysemic neologism with the English “oh men sent” as “omen sent” and “Oh! Men
sent” underlining the relation of feminine jouissance to the castration of God.
10
See James Strong, ed., The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Bible Concordance (New York:
Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2010).
34 manya steinkoler
gave her (Gen 21:6) – as many rabbis point out, only occurs once in the entire
Bible. Sarah uses the verb in this tense to tell of her experience. After Isaac
is born, she says:
21:6 ‫לי‬-‫ יצחק‬,‫השמע‬-‫ כל‬:‫ עשה לי אלהים‬,‫ותאמר שרה–צחק‬
21:6 God hath made me to laugh/made me laugh/made laughter of me. Every
one that heareth will laugh with me (Gen. 21 6:7).
What is so funny, Sarah? What is the punch line? Why the specificity of
this verb appearing in this tense only once in the entire Old Testament?
Perhaps we could say ‫( צחק‬tschok) is an inscription of Sarah’s jouissance;
the singularity of it is underlined by its singular appearance of the verb in
this form. For Abraham, the imaginary stasis concerns himself as phallic. For
Sarah, the imaginary stasis concerns the non-castration of God. Laughter is
Sarah’s jouissance, rendered possible by the barred Other.
In addition to a lack in the Other, or as an instance of such a lack, Sarah
could have laughed at God’s bad timing. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant
states that laughter is a “sudden evaporation of expectation to nothing.”11 In
hearing the punch line, Sarah’s built-up tension disappears. “Now you’re
giving me a child?” “You’re so powerful – you wait till I’m 90? This is how
you have shown your power? This is the omnipotent God of Abraham?
What kind of God is this? You couldn’t do this seventy years ago? I had to be
humiliated by Hagar and become an old woman first? So at 90 when I can’t
bend over to put on my sandals, milk the goat, or grind the barley, now I get
to be the mother of a great nation? This is the God of Abraham? You go to all
this work to show you have power over my body? Now that is funny!”
We recall that Freud tells us that there is a satisfaction in the joke of an
intention or tendency that otherwise would not have taken place.12 There is the
satisfying of an intention that the joke is able to get around, an inhibition. In
addition, Freud tells us in his section on “Motives for the Joke” that we are “not
content making a joke for themselves alone. The urge to communicate the joke
is indissolubly linked to the joke work.”13 He continues: “One is compelled to
pass on a joke: the psychical process of joke formation does not seem to be over
when the joke occurs to its author; something is left that tries to compete with
this unknown process of joke formation by passing the joke on.”14 The
satisfaction of the laughter is linked to the satisfaction of God’s promise, then,
as a promise that still makes good – but not in the way you might have
11
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 133.
12
Sigmund Freud, “On the Mechanism of Pleasure and the Psychological Origin of the Joke,” in Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1960), 113.
13 14
Ibid., 138. Ibid.
expected. . . . Yeah you will have a baby – but you’ll be 90! That is the joke –
there’s a punch line – but not the one you expected.
Sarah says (literally) that “God made me laughter” and everyone who hears
the story “will become laughter/ Isaac to me.” Sarah’s words point to the joke’s
transmission; she underlines speaking and listening, i.e., what she has been doing
all along. As listening, she maintains and imagines the future of her pleasure,
here laughter; she is concerned only with reproduction insofar as it concerns
laughter at the story. So while Abraham is concerned with the promise of
children, and the nation he founds, Sarah only mentions that people will laugh
at this story when hearing it in the future. I am reminded how, in Seminar V,15
Lacan mentions Moliere’s Ecole des Femmes where Arnolphe thinks he’s keeping
his young ward Agnès stupid because she thinks babies “are made through the
ear.” And yet, Lacan points out, this is precisely the way Arnolphe is himself
stupid; he does not realize that Agnès is a speaking being. The joke is on
Arnolphe. The biblical story tells us clearly – Agnès is right. Babies are made
through the ear!
Sarah’s transmission, then, concerns laughter. All that hear the story of her
son’s coming into the world will be her “laughter” – her Isaac, laughter to her
(Yitzhak li) (Isaac to her). Literally, Sarah’s children are those who hear the story
and laugh. After all, Sarah says that she will nurse “children” (Gen. 21:7) but the
text tells us that she will have only birthed one child. In laughing, we become
“laughter to her,” we become her children. Laughter/(Isaac) is the transmission
of Sarah’s pleasure – the pleasure of the joke! The name of Yitzhak laughter is
the transmission, and the tense of the name implies futurity. The punch line is
that we laugh. . .that Edenic pleasure comes back to us. . .encore. . .again. . .
WORKS CITED
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James
Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1960.
Herczeg, Rabbi Yisrael, ed. Sapirstein Edition Rashi: The Torah with Rashi’s
Commentary Translated, Annotated and Elucidated, Vols. 1–5: Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah
Publications, 1995.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar V. Translated by Cormac Gallagher. Unpublished
papers.
Seminar XX. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and
Knowledge. Translated by Bruce Fink. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.
15
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar V, trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished papers. Lesson of December 18,
1957.
chapter 2
Psychoanalysis as gai saber

Toward a new episteme of laughter
Dany Nobus
Encounter with a fantasist

Sometime during the mid-1950s, Madeleine Chapsal, a thirty-something
journalist writing for L’express – the recently launched weekly supplement
to the French financial daily Les Échos – attended a fancy dress party
organized by the editorial board of Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps
Modernes, where she was introduced to a certain Dr. Lacan. Many years
later, Chapsal recalled the event as follows: “The first time I saw Jacques
Lacan he was wearing a bushy ginger-colored wig, and he invited me to
dance . . . That night the famous psychoanalyst’s head presented me with
an image of him that I never forgot: he was a fantasist!”1 In her seminal
historical study of Lacan, Élisabeth Roudinesco drew on a personal
conversation with Chapsal to elaborate on the story. According to
Roudinesco, the young female journalist had adored Lacan’s “penchant
for disguise [le côté travesti du personnage], his auburn wigs, his love of
social life and gossip, [and] the way he enjoyed theatrical situations.”2 After
their first encounter, Lacan and Chapsal immediately struck up an
intimate friendship, leading to Chapsal being regularly invited to Lacan’s
country house at Guitrancourt, and her receiving a long series of amorous
letters and notes, in which the psychoanalyst would sometimes ask his
confidante for specific sartorial advice when he was preparing for another
bal masqué.3 Whether Dr. Lacan was in the habit of wearing ostentatious
wigs at fancy dress parties, I do not know. Whether he would also wear
them in other situations, I do not know either. Maybe Chapsal was
chuffed and charmed when she saw on the psychoanalyst’s cranium a
1
Madeleine Chapsal, “Jacques Lacan,” in Envoyez la petite musique . . . (Paris: Grasset, 1984), 31. Unless
otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language sources are my own.
2
Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York & London: Columbia
University Press, 1997), 261.
3
Chapsal, “Jacques Lacan,” 38.
36
Psychoanalysis: Toward a new episteme of laughter 37
grotesque reflection of her own notorious ginger mop. Maybe she was
just puzzled, bemused, and surprised. Fact of the matter is that on
that particular evening, Lacan’s exuberant hirsute display of color
made such an important impression on Chapsal that she was left with
an inerasable “flash-bulb” memory, gladly accepted all his invitations –
to dance, to dine, to play and to wine – and eventually conducted a
long interview with him for L’express, in which he paid tribute to the
revolutionary discoveries of his master Sigmund Freud, defended his
own linguistic approach to Freud’s legacy, and denounced how con-
temporary psychoanalysis was descending ever more into a “confused
mythology.”4
To the best of my knowledge, no one apart from Chapsal ever reported
similar occurrences of Lacan dressing up, disguising himself, or regaling an
audience with odd accessories and idiosyncratic accoutrements. No one,
that is, apart from Lacan himself. The day is Friday November 1, 1974. In
New York City, at the United Nations Headquarters, the UN General
Assembly adopts Resolution 3212, which calls upon all states to respect the
sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and non-alignment of the
Republic of Cyprus. In Rome, in the splendorous concert hall of the
Accademia Musicale di Santa Cecilia, Lacan speaks at the 7th Conference
of the École freudienne de Paris, the school he himself had founded ten
years earlier. In front of a packed auditorium, Lacan declares:
There isn’t a single discourse in which make-belief [le semblant] does not
rule [mène le jeu] . . . And so you should be more relaxed and more
spontaneous [naturels] when you meet someone who is asking you for
analysis. Don’t feel so obliged to act as if you’re really important. Even as
jesters [bouffons], your being is justified. You only have to watch my
Television. I am a clown. Take that as an example, and don’t imitate me!
The seriousness that animates me is the series that you constitute. You can’t
at the same time be part of it [en être] and be it [l’être].5
4
Jacques Lacan, “Clefs pour la psychanalyse” (1957) rpt. in Chapsal’s Envoyez la petite musique . . .,
42–54. In 1991, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Lacan’s death, the original text and the
cartoons were reprinted in the psychoanalytic magazine l’Âne, yet without reference to Chapsal,
without the introduction, and with the original sub-headings replaced with a new and unattributed
set of paragraph titles. A facsimile of the text was subsequently reprinted in 2000 in the
psychoanalytic journal la célibataire, again without reference to Chapsal, yet with the
acknowledgement of Françoise Giroud – the co-founder and editor of L’express – as the one who
had made the interview possible. See Jacques Lacan, “Entretien avec Jacques Lacan,” l’Âne 48 (1991):
28–33; Jacques Lacan, “Les clefs de la psychanalyse,” la célibataire 4 (2000): 99–104. An anonymous
English translation of the interview as published in l’Âne can be accessed via the following website:
http://braungardt.trialectics.com/sciences/psychoanalysis/jacques-lacan/interview-jacques-lacan/.
5
Jacques Lacan, “La troisième,” La cause freudienne 79 (September 2011): 15.
38 dany nobus
Anyone who has ever read the text called Television, which was pub-
lished following Lacan’s appearance on French television in January 1974,
will probably seriously doubt the seriousness of Lacan’s self-assessment,
here, because alongside Radiophonie and L’étourdit, both from the same
period, it counts amongst the most conceptually abstruse and intellectually
demanding of the psychoanalyst’s later works.6 I have never come across
anyone who admitted to having experienced uncontrollable fits of laughter
at the reading of Television, or who thought that reading Television was
great fun, or that the text was an inexhaustible source of amusement –
intellectually or otherwise. But here is the twist: Lacan did not exhort his
audience to read the text of Television, but to watch him on television,
literally performing notes that would later be published with the
eponymous title.7 In telling his listeners in Rome, and particularly the
psychoanalysts among them, that he was a clown when playing the text
that was subsequently entitled Television, Lacan insisted on the sensory
qualities of the spoken word – delivered with a highly distinctive tone of
voice, and accompanied by a number of visually arresting mannerisms –
and not on a particular feature of its written inscription. Something of the
intentionally comical disappears, then, when the words become detached
from the person speaking them, from the way in which they are
articulated, with their particular punctuation and their carefully crafted
timing. And yet, when the words are being re-connected to the image of
the living body of the psychoanalyst who is declaiming them, in this case
Jacques Lacan, they do not by definition generate laughter either, strange
as the performance may be. Vocalizing a version of his own text Television
on television, Lacan did not tell jokes, was not wearing a wig, did not dance,
and could never even be seen smiling or laughing. But he did not want to be
taken entirely seriously. Those who did take him seriously, so seriously that
they were prepared to follow him, demonstrated both their captivation by
what they perceived to be the image of the unassailable master, and their
6
See Jacques Lacan, “Television,” in Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed.
Joan Copjec and trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss & Annette Michelson (New York & London:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 3–46; Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil,
2001), 403–447; Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 449–495.
7
The small volume entitled Television is effectively the edited text of two one-hour long “Lacan-
shows” directed by Benoît Jacquot, which were aired during prime-time on two consecutive Saturday
evenings by France’s main television channel ORTF, at the end of January 1974, under the title
Psychanalyse I and Psychanalyse II. In each of these, Lacan can be seen “acting out” a scenario he
himself had written, in response to some questions by Jacques-Alain Miller, his son-in-law and
intellectual heir. See Benoît Jacquot, “Television,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks and Jorge Jauregui,
Lacanian Ink 21 (2003): 86–89; Benoît Jacquot, “How Lacan,” trans. Asunción Alvarez, Lacanian
Ink 39 (2012): 66–77.
unwillingness to allow this image to fall from the superior position it was
held to occupy. They may have gone so far as to laugh with him, but they
would never have dared to laugh at him. In Rome in 1974, Lacan in a sense
complained about the fact that too many psychoanalysts were lacking in
humor, despite his best intentions to make them laugh or, better still,
despite his consistent attempts at presenting himself as a risible figure.
In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the thespian side of Lacan’s
character, his keen eye for comedy, and his utter contempt for
self-indulgent gravitas were not just ad hoc phenomena – “accidental”
features of his private and public persona, frivolous flights of fancy elicited
by particular social circumstances – but rather essential components of a
consciously considered outlook on life, which also and most crucially
informed his conception of psychoanalytic theory and practice. More
specifically, I will argue that, when Lacan at one point went so far as to
assert that he was gay, this “confession” was inspired by the same reasons
that prompted homosexual people in the Anglophone world to adopt the
word “gay” as the most apposite designation for their sexual orientation.
Lacan aimed for a subtle, humorous resistance to normative practices and
established conventions, and for him this principle of “gayness” was to be
situated at the heart of psychoanalytic knowledge, both in its purely
theoretical and in its clinical applications. At the end of this chapter
I will propose, therefore, that my portrait of Lacan-the-psychoanalyst as
a gay man, which is not at all antagonistic to how his master Sigmund
Freud would come across in “non-official” representations, may offer us a
useful paradigm for the way in which psychoanalytic knowledge should be
advanced, as well as a valuable metaphor for how knowledge should be
maintained in psychoanalytic institutions that want to remain truthful to
the epistemic foundations of their discipline. As such, I will suggest that
against the formalistic rigidity of institutionalized psychoanalytic
knowledge, it is crucial for psychoanalysts to re-engage with the “dancing”
thought of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which encapsulates the prophet’s most
radical answer to the sterile status of ponderous, petrified reasoning, and to
embrace an episteme of laughter.
Jacques Lacan is gay

On two separate occasions, in public and without ostensible shame or
irony, Lacan conceded that he was gay. The day is Sunday October 22,
1967. In Washington DC, thousands of young demonstrators storm the
Pentagon out of protest against the Vietnam War. At the Maison de la
40 dany nobus
Chimie on the rue Saint-Dominique in Paris, the Belgian-French
psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni is presiding over a study weekend on
psychosis, featuring presentations both by members of Lacan’s École
freudienne de Paris and by a number of high-profile external speakers, such
as Donald Woods Winnicott, David Cooper, and Ronald David Laing.
As would have been common, Lacan delivered the closing speech of the
conference, during which he divulged:
Everyone knows that I am gay [je suis gai], some would even say that I’m a
bit childish [gamin]. I’m having a good time [je m’amuse]. It constantly
happens to me that, in my texts, I am giving myself over to all kinds of jokes
[plaisanteries], which is not to the taste of academics. But look, it’s true, I’m
not sad. Or more precisely, I only have one real sadness, in what has
been traced out for me by way of a career, and that is that there are fewer
and fewer people to whom I can explain the reasons for me being gay, when
I do have them.8
One could easily dismiss this brief public “confession” as a facetious
fait divers, not signaling much of a commitment, were it not for the fact
that three-and-a-half years later, Lacan again disclosed his “subjective
affectation,” this time in front of a massive audience at his weekly
seminar. The day is Wednesday May 12, 1971. At the local town hall
in St Tropez, Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger is getting married
to Bianca Pérez-Mora de Macias. At the great lecture theatre of the Law
Faculty on the Place du Panthéon in Paris, Lacan is treating his audience
to a performance of “Lituraterre,” a text he has written for a special
journal issue on psychoanalysis and literature.9 Telling the hundreds of
devoted listeners how he has learnt to read some Chinese characters,
Lacan goes on to describe his limitations when it comes to deciphering
the handwriting:
In the handwritten form, I can’t recognize the character anymore, because
I am a novice. But that’s not really what is important, because what I call
the singular can actually support a firmer form. What is important is what is
added. It is a dimension or – in the way I’ve taught you to play with these
things – a demansion, where something resides that I introduced to you in
the previous seminar or in the one before with the word that I wrote, simply
8
Jacques Lacan, “Discours de clôture des journées sur les psychoses,” Recherches 8 (1968): 145.
9
See Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 11–19. For two authorized
English translations of this essay, see Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” trans. Beatrice Khiara-Foxton &
Adrian Price, Hurly-Burly: The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (2013): 29–38;
Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” trans. Dany Nobus, Continental Philosophy Review 46.1 (2013): 327–
334.
to amuse myself, as papeludun [a word play on pas-plus-d’un, no more than
one]. It’s the demansion of which you know that it allows me . . . to install
the subject into what I will call today, simply because I’m producing
literature and I’m gay [je suis gai] – you will recognize it, because I’ve
already written it under a different form – the Hun-En-Peluce [a word play
on Un-en-plus, One more].10
It is worth noting, here, that the phrase “I’m gay” is not actually part of
the text that Lacan was reading, insofar as it does not appear in any of the
published versions of “Lituraterre.” Much like something is “added” to the
standard Chinese character when it is reproduced by a “subjective hand,”
which may effectively prevent non-experts from finding their way around
the handwritten text, “I’m gay” represents the singular subjective
“demansion,” which Lacan himself added to the text, when he was speaking
and performing the written words in front of a live audience. As such, this
particular phrase already constitutes Lacan’s own meta-textual
interpretation of “Lituraterre,” something he decided to add to it in the
spur of the moment, as an explanatory reflection upon his persistent
punning on words. What could have prompted Lacan to tell his listeners
that he was gay, and what reasons could he have had for being gay in the
first place? For, as he pointed out in his lecture on October 22, 1967, he
definitely had his reasons, despite the fact that there were progressively
fewer and fewer people around to whom he could explain himself.
Of course, one should not be deceived, here, by the fact that in the
English-speaking world the word “gay” has acquired strong connotations
of (male) homosexuality, which have now almost completely taken over its
entire semantic field. At the end of the 1960s, such connotations were still
uncommon, especially in France. No one should be misled, therefore, in
thinking that whilst the Pentagon was being stormed and Mick Jagger was
getting married Lacan was coming out of the closet as a homosexual
cruiser. I could have chosen to render Lacan’s “je suis gai ” as “I am
cheerful,” “I am joyous,” “I am joyful,” or “I am happy,” yet these terms
would no doubt be better suited as translations of the French words
10
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 2006), 120. This is my own translation of the official French version of
Lacan’s seminar session, verified against other, more literal transcriptions, such as the one that can
be found on the website, “Espaces Lacan”: http://espace.freud.pagesperso-orange.fr/topos/psycha/
psysem/semblan/semblan7.htm and a number of tape-recordings made by members of the
audience, one of which can be found at www.valas.fr/IMG/mp3/7_semblant_12_5_71.mp3. For
an excellent general introduction to Lacan’s seminar, see Bruce Fink, “An Introduction to Lacan’s
Seminar XVIII,” in Against Understanding. Vol. 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key
(London & New York: Routledge, 2014), 71–91.
42 dany nobus
“enjoué,” “joyeux,” or “heureux,” and one would only really want to avoid
the word “gay” on account of its current association with a certain sexual
orientation, which at the time it just did not have.11
In fact, there are very good reasons for insisting on the significance of
Lacan’s being gay – as opposed to him being merely cheerful or joyous –
and they are essentially the same as those that encouraged Walter
Kaufmann to continue to render the title of Nietzsche’s Die Fröhliche
Wissenschaft as The Gay Science, from his first discussion of the book in his
seminal 1950 revisionist account of the German philosopher, up to his
landmark 1974 translation of the work, which was released at a time when
the word “gay” had already been adumbrated by the homosexual
community in the English-speaking world.12 Without going so far as to
suggest that Nietzsche was homosexual, which he very well may have been,
Kaufmann clarifies: “[I]t is no accident that the homosexuals as well as
Nietzsche opted for ‘gay’ rather than ‘cheerful.’ ‘Gay science’, unlike ‘cheer-
ful science’, has overtones of a light-hearted defiance of convention; it
suggests Nietzsche’s ‘immoralism’ and his ‘revaluation of values’. . . What
Nietzsche himself wanted the title to convey was that serious thinking does
not have to be stodgy, heavy, dusty, or, in one word Teutonic.”13 In his
introduction to a more recent translation of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft,
Bernard Williams makes a similar point: “No one, presumably, is going to
be misled by the more recent associations of the word ‘gay’—it simply
means joyful, light-hearted, and above all, lacking in solemnity.”14 Likewise,
in me saying that Lacan admitted to being gay, no one will presumably be
led to believe that I want to insinuate that he actually confessed to being a
11
Indeed, in his unofficial English translation of Lacan’s seminar session of 12 May 1971, Cormac
Gallagher has rendered Lacan’s “je suis gai” as “I am happy.” See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book
XVIII, On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, trans. Cormac Gallagher, privately printed.
12
See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton & London:
Princeton University Press, 2013).
13
Walter Kaufmann, translator’s introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude
in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 4–5. For a
fascinating reconstruction of Nietzsche’s alleged (suppressed) homosexuality, and its potential
influence on the shaping of his ideas, see Joachim Köhler, Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Ronald Taylor (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002).
14
Bernard Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, With a Prelude in
German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, poems translated by Adrian
Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), x. Interestingly, in the new English
edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was launched by Stanford University
Press in 1995 and which is based on the authoritative Kritische Studienausgabe by Colli-Montinari,
the title of volume 6, whose publication date has not been announced yet, was originally mentioned
as The Gay Science, whereas the publisher’s website currently has it listed as The Joyful Science . . . See
the listing of Volume 6 on Stanford University Press’s website.
homosexual, although the notion’s connotations of spontaneous,
undirected playfulness and its implicit purpose of demonstrating carefree
civil disobedience served the homosexual community extremely well.
But there are other than purely linguistic reasons for emphasizing
Lacan’s and Nietzsche’s gaiety. When Nietzsche ‘composed’ Die Fröhliche
Wissenschaft – not once, but twice between 1881 and 1886 – he gave the
second edition of his book the parenthetical subtitle “la gaya scienza,” thus
suggesting that his own German title was effectively already a translation,
and that fröhlich was intended to render the adjective gaya. In addition, as
Nietzsche pointed out in a passage of Ecce Homo published in 1888, one
year after the second edition of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, the so-called
“Songs of Prince Vogelfrei,” which were added to this second edition, “are
very clearly reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaya scienza, that unity
of singer, knight, and free spirit that is distinctive of the wonderful early
culture of Provence.”15 It is unclear how Nietzsche had come across the
concept of gaya scienza. He may have discovered it via Ralph Waldo
Emerson, with whose works he had become infatuated as a schoolboy
and whose essays he ardently re-read whilst writing The Gay Science.16
Alternatively, his knowledge of it may have stemmed from his own deep
personal interest in Mediterranean culture, as represented in this case by
the medieval troubadours of Southern France.
15
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo: How To Become What You Are,” in The Anti-Christ, Ecce
Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
16
We know that Nietzsche re-read Emerson whilst he was working on Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft from
a note he made during the Autumn of 1881: “In no other book [than Emerson’s selected essays] have
I ever felt so much at home and in my home – I can’t praise it, it is just too close to me.” See
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Nachgelassene Fragmente 1880–1882,” in Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 588. Emerson designated himself as a “Professor of the
Joyous Science” in an early lecture entitled “Prospects,” which was originally delivered at the
Masonic Temple in Boston on January 20, 1842. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Prospects,” in The
Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1972), 368. He repeated the phrase thirty-four years later, in a lecture on “The
Scholar” presented at the University of Virginia on 28 June 1876. In the latter “oration,” he stated: “I
think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were
called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The
Scholar,” in Complete Works, Vol. X: Lectures and Biographical Sketches (Boston: Houghton Miflin &
Co. 1888), 250. Emerson specifically referred to “gai science” (sic) in the 1876 essay “Poetry and
Imagination,” which had started life as a lecture on “Poetry and English Poetry” from 1854. See
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” in Letters and Social Aims (London: Macmillan
and Co, 1898), 28. The literature on Nietzsche’s intellectual indebtedness to Emerson is vast. For
recent discussions, with a particular focus on The Gay Science, see Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche,
Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press 2011), 32–34
and Paul Grimstad, Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the
Jameses (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33–36.
44 dany nobus
In 1323, seven distinguished citizens of Toulouse founded the Sobregaya
Companhia del Gay Saber (literally, “The super gay company of the gay
knowledge”), with the aims of fighting sadness and boredom, celebrating
joyful educational practices through song and dance, and establishing an
annual poetry contest open to all “dictador et trobador.”17 In order to
evaluate the quality of the poems more rigorously, and with a view to
promoting Occitan grammar, the seven members of the “gay company”
then asked a lawyer by the name of Guilhem Molinier to compile a
comprehensive handbook setting out the fundamental rules of lyrical
poetry. The book was eventually published under the title Las Leys d’Amors
(The Laws of Love Poetry), and became hugely influential in various parts of
Southern Europe as the standard treatise on the art of poetry.18 Over time,
the Toulousians became known in Occitan as the Consistori de la Gaya
Sciensa, in Spanish as the Consistorio del Gay Saber, and in French as La
Compagnie des mainteneurs du Gai Savoir, although the polyphony of
languages and the amalgamation of cultures in the Mediterranean during
the late Middle Ages often resulted in various hybrid designations such as
Consistori del Gai Saber, Consistoire de la Gaie Science and Consistori de la
Gaya Ciència. The shift from “sciensa” to “saber,” and “savoir” makes
sufficiently clear, here, that the Consistory did not so much intend to
redefine the rules of scientific practice, or the practical (empirical)
principles of science, but rather the language of knowledge, or the
rhetorical and especially the poetic structures governing a certain type of
knowledge production. Gaya scienza is in essence “gay knowledge,” “gay
learning,” or “gay intelligence,” rather than “gay science,” although any
kind of science (in the commonly accepted meaning of the word) will
inevitably draw upon and generate bodies of knowledge.19
17
See Georges Passerat, “L’Église et la poésie: les débuts du Consistori del Gay Saber,” in Église et culture
en France méridionale (XIIe-XIVe siècle), ed. Jean-Louis Biget (Toulouse: Privat, 2000), 443–473.
18
See Joseph Anglade ed., Las Leys d’Amors: Manuscrit de l’Académie des Jeux Floraux (Toulouse:
Privat, 1919–20); Joseph Anglade, “La doctrine grammaticale et poétique du Gai Savoir,” in Todd
Memorial Volumes: Philological Studies. Vol. 1, ed. John D. Fitz-Gerald & Pauline Taylor (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1930), 47–58; Robert Lafont, “Les ‘Leys d’Amors’ et la mutation de la
conscience occitane,” Revue des langues romanes 76 (1966): 13–59; John Stevens, Words and Music in
the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Cathérine Léglu, “Language in Conflict in Toulouse: Las Leys d’Amors,” The Modern
Language Review 103.2 (2008): 383–396.
19
As such, Nietzsche was definitely right in rendering scienza as Wissenschaft, but the latter term
should not be retranslated into English, as some Nietzsche-scholars have done, as “wisdom.” Apart
from the fact that Wissenschaft never refers to wisdom in German, Nietzsche intended to advance a
new type of scholarly investigation, resulting in a new kind of knowledge, which was not meant to
be any less serious, disciplined and rigorous than conventional scientific practices and doctrines, but
which would overcome the rigid, formalistic style of academic, professorial science, as it was to be
What characterizes gai saber, and what the didactic style of the Leys
d’Amors may easily obfuscate, is the ludic and jocular approach to the
composition of lyrical poetry, its deliberate recourse to semantic
ambiguities, its recurrent re-creation of internal inconsistencies with regard
to meter and rhyme, and its untroubled usage of apparent contradictions,
making any literal or realistic interpretation impossible and therefore
misguided.20 As the Belgian medievalist Roger Dragonetti put it: “It is
entirely clear that the concept of gay saber, supported by the dionysiac
basis of joy, which the poets of courtly love celebrate with overwhelming
fervor and a state of ravishing, supposes an entirely joyous, mocking and
amusing side . . . In a sense, the poets of the maternal idiom aimed to
conquer knowledge through poetry, because for the gay saber of the
troubadours it was all about turning the new literary language into a place
for the most subtle findings [trouvailles] of reason, and at the same time for
the play of letters and words.”21 Serious as the Consistory may have been
when it came to identifying the best canço, recognizing the “most excellent
poet” (plus excellen Dictador) and awarding the coveted violeta d’aur
found primarily in German (Teutonic) quarters. Although Wissenschaft (science) is, strictly speaking,
the most accurate translation of scienza, we should interpret “science” in the broadest possible sense
here, Nietzsche aiming his derision at all the representatives of humorless knowledge-production, at
all those epistemic authorities who do not believe that serious knowledge can simultaneously be
playful, light-hearted and funny. For more detailed elaborations of this point, see Keith Ansell-
Pearson, “The Gay Science” in A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and Works, ed. Paul Bishop
(Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 167–192; Babette E. Babich, “Nietzsche’s ‘Gay’ Science,” in
A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Malden MA-London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),
97–114; Kathleen Marie Higgins, Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Monika M. Langer, Nietzsche’s Gay Science: Dancing Coherence
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Christopher Janaway, “The Gay Science,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes & John Richardson (Oxford & New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 252–271.
20
In a review of the 1967 French translation of Nietzsche’s Fröhliche Wissenschaft, by Pierre
Klossowski, the French critic and translator Jean-Louis Backès intimated that it was precisely this
total defiance of contradictions or, viewed from a different angle, the pervasive simultaneous
presence of seemingly incompatible experiences – happiness and sorrow, jubilation and despair –
which may have attracted Nietzsche to the gaya scienza in the first place. See Jean-Louis Backès, “Le
gai saber,” Critique 251 (1968): 347–367.
21
See Roger Dragonetti, Le gai savoir dans la rhétorique courtoise. Flamenca et Joufroi de Poitiers (Paris:
du Seuil, 1982), 15–16. Dragonetti’s own interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, combined with his
intellectual generosity toward his students, resulted in the emergence of a small group of Lacanian
medievalists, including Charles Méla, Henri Rey-Flaud and Alexandre Leupin. A collection of letters
between Dragonetti and Lacan is preserved at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. It is also worth
noting, here, that the word troubadour is derived from the Occitan verb trobar, which means “to
compose poetry,” but also “to find” and “to invent.” See Roger Dragonetti, Aux frontières du langage
poétique. Études sur Dante, Mallarmé, Valéry (Gand: Romanica Gandensia, 1961); Simon Gaunt &
Sarah Kay eds., The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
294.
46 dany nobus
(golden violet) at their annual poetry contest, they would not necessarily
have been looking for the most serious-minded troubadour, or at least
not for the poet who displayed the most rigorous understanding of the
rules of lyrical poetry, but rather for a joglar (minstrel, performer) who
was capable of demonstrating the most coltish, frisky, jaunty, merry,
mirthful, spirited, and sprightly interpretation of the rulebook, so that
something new and surprising was being invented. A true troubadour is
someone who despises the humorless gravitas of the formal form, some-
one who, when he gets down to do his business, cannot conform to any
kind of accepted practice or standard pattern, neither within the sym-
bolic framework of language nor within the rules of engagement that
govern human interaction. As the troubadour Bertran de Born put it
after spending time at a court in Normandy in 1182: “Ja mais non er cortz
complia on hom non grab ni non ria” (Never is a court complete when no
one jokes or laughs).22
When Lacan confessed publicly to being gay, on October 22, 1967, and
again on May 12, 1971, there can be no doubt that he meant it. He was not
joking about his affectation, and very much wanted to be taken seriously as
a “gay psychoanalyst.” By contrast with Nietzsche, there is no evidence
that Lacan ever delved into Emerson, nor, for that matter, that he ever paid
any serious attention to Nietzsche’s “gay science.”23 Nonetheless, when he
said he was gay, Lacan presented himself not just as being in a jolly,
cheerful mood, but also and primarily as a self-identified “Professor of
the Joyous Science” – one who is fully attuned to the poetic principles
of the Provençal troubadours. And although he may not have known
anything about Emerson, Lacan definitely knew something about the
gaya scienza.
22
Qtd in Ruth Harvey, “Courtly Culture in Medieval Occitania,” in The Troubadours, ed. Simon
Gaunt and Sarah Kay, 8. As it happens, it was not until the late nineteenth century that scholars
started to appreciate the humor and playfulness in troubadour poetry, but not until the 1960s,
following the translation into English of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, that this type of appreciation in
itself was taken seriously. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949); Don A. Monson, “The Troubadours at Play: Irony,
Parody and Burlesque,” in The Troubadours, 197–211.
23
There are no references to Emerson in any of Lacan’s written texts and seminars. As to Nietzsche,
Lacan briefly referred to The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and On the Genealogy of
Morality in some of his seminars, but to the best of my knowledge he never mentioned The Gay
Science. On two occasions, he did invoke the theme of the “death of God,” which looms large over
the third and fifth books of The Gay Science, but this in itself is no indication that he actually read
Nietzsche’s work in this respect. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse
(1965–66), unpublished, session of 25 May 1966; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 27.
The day is Saturday September 26, 1953. In Hannibal MO the
CBS-affiliated KHQA TV channel 7 begins broadcasting. At the Institute
of Psychology of the University of Rome, Lacan introduces the lengthy
report entitled, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis,” which he has written during the summer, with a largely
improvised address directed at the friends who have had the courage to
follow him in the wake of a split in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. At
the end of his speech, Lacan exposes the grave errors committed by his
fellow psychoanalysts, in the name of a spurious allegiance to the
so-called classical tradition, but he is also reassuring his audience that
there is hope: “If psychoanalysis is a source of truth, it is also a source
of wisdom. And this wisdom has a face, which has never deceived
anyone, ever since human beings have occupied themselves with its
destiny. All wisdom is a gay savoir. It is being opened up, it subverts, it
sings, it instructs, it laughs. It is all language. Nourish yourselves on
its tradition, from Rabelais to Hegel. Open your ears to popular songs,
to the marvelous dialogues of the street. You will receive the style
through which humanity is revealed in human beings, and the mean-
ing of language, without which you will never liberate speech.”24
During the question-and-answer session that follows, Lacan drives
his point home with two additional references to the importance of
the gay savoir, not drawing on examples from the troubadours but
mentioning the satirical linguistic pyrotechnics of François Rabelais.25
Again, it is worth noting here that gay savoir is what Lacan adds to the
written text of his “Rome Discourse,” when he is presenting it to the
audience. When Rabelais is mentioned in the written text, there is no
evocation of gay savoir.26
For all I have been able to establish, there are no further references
to gay savoir in any of Lacan’s written or spoken interventions until
some thirteen years later. The day is Wednesday January 19, 1966. In
India, Indira Gandhi is elected prime minister. In France, at Lacan’s
seminar at the École normale supérieure, which is focusing on the
object in psychoanalysis, the audience is listening to a commentary
by a certain Madame le Docteur Parisot on a paper by Roger
Dragonetti, which deals with the function of the image in the works
24
Jacques Lacan, “Discours de Rome,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 146.
25
Ibid, 149, 152.
26
For the full written text of Lacan’s “Rome Discourse,” see Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field
of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton
and Co., 2006), 197–268. The reference to Rabelais appears on page 230.
48 dany nobus
of Dante.27 Following the presentation, Lacan gives his own views on
the matter and states: “It is insofar as jouissance – I am not saying
pleasure – is withdrawn from the field of courtly love that a certain
configuration is established there which allows a certain equilibrium
between truth and knowledge. It is properly what has been called . . .
le gai savoir.”28 Some six years earlier, Lacan had devoted a couple of
sessions of his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis to courtly love
and the troubadours, insisting on the crucial significance of the
female love-object’s unattainability – if not in real life, at least in
the songs and love poetry of the wandering singers.29 In extracting
the jouissance from their songs, and concentrating on desire, the
troubadours’ gai savoir became, at least to Lacan, a more playful,
less heavy, more truthful and less petrified knowledge.
As we now know, in October 1967 and May 1971 Lacan said he was gay,
but for all I know there was no further mention of gai saber during this
period. Until Friday July 14, 1972. At the Crimean Astrophysical
Observatory in the Ukraine, Lyudmila Vasilyevna Zhuravleva discovers
asteroids #1959 Karbyshev and #2423 Ibarruri. France is celebrating its
national holiday, and Lacan is making a contribution to the 50th anniver-
sary of the establishment of the Henri-Rousselle hospital, which was
effectively the first open psychiatric clinic in France – admitting patients
without them necessarily having been sectioned. The text is called
“L’étourdit” and although he does not explicitly say it – and I have no
way of proving it – Lacan is rather gay in it, and so he conjures up the gay
science: “Insofar as it is the language that is most propitious for the
scientific discourse, mathematics is the science without conscience which
has been promised to us by our dear old Rabelais; it is the science which
can only remain blocked to a philosopher: the gay science [la gaye science]
is rejoicing by presuming the ruin of the soul.”30 Eighteen months later,
in Television, we know that Lacan was gay, because he himself said he had
been a clown on it, if not in it. Much like he did when he delivered the
closing speech at the conference on psychosis in October 1967, Lacan
opposed gay science to sadness: “In contrast with sadness [tristesse] there is
27
See Roger Dragonetti, “Dante et Narcisse ou les faux-monnayeurs de l’image,” Revue des Etudes
Italiennes 102 (1965): 85–146.
28
See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse, unpublished, session of January
19, 1966.
29
See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and
trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 85–164.
30
Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 453.
the Gay science [gay sçavoir], which is a virtue. A virtue absolves no one from
sin – which is, as everyone knows, original. The virtue that I designate as the
Gay science [gay sçavoir] exemplifies it, by showing clearly of what it consists:
not understanding, not a poking into meaning, but a flying over it as low as
possible without the meaning’s gumming up this virtue, thus enjoying [jouir]
the deciphering, which implies that the Gay science [gay sçavoir] cannot but
meet in it the Fall, the return into sin.”31
Gay psychoanalysis
Only a handful of interpretations of Lacan’s references to gai saber are
available in French, and to the best of my knowledge no Lacan scholar in
the English-speaking world has ever paid any serious attention to Lacan’s
gayness or to his reliance on the “gay science.”32 Yet as Madeleine Chapsal
observed when she first encountered the hirsute ginger Dr. Lacan, the
psychoanalyst, was definitely a fantasist and an extremely serious one at
that.33 Returning from Rome in September 1953, Lacan moved his weekly
seminar to the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, and for the next twenty-five
years or so he had a real blast, thoroughly enjoying himself with all kinds of
things, from strange physical experiments to even stranger topological
objects, indulging himself in recreational mathematics and performing
31
Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, 22. Translation modified.
32
For sources in French, see Anaëlle Lebovits, “Gai savoir,” La lettre mensuelle 258 (2007): 23–25;
Pascalle Vallois, “Le gai savoir de Lacan,” Letterina – Bulletin de l’ACF Normandie 35 (2003): 69–76;
Serge Cottet, “Gai savoir et triste vérité,” La cause freudienne 35 (1997): 33–36; Anne Lysy-Stevens,
“Raser le sens: le gay sçavoir,” Quarto 51 (1993): 80–85; Anne Lysy-Stevens, “A propos du ‘gay
sçavoir,’” Les Feuillets du Courtil 6 (1993): 25–47; Monique Kusnierek, “Le gay sçavoir, un affect
lacanien,” Quarto 25 (1986): 4–6. In her otherwise excellent study of how Lacan’s theory of desire is
crucially indebted to his reading of various medieval texts, Erin Felicia Labbie makes no mention
whatsoever of the gai saber. A book chapter by Joan Copjec raises high expectations, but does not
address Lacan’s engagement with gai saber either. See Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism,
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Joan Copjec, “Gai Savoir Sera:
The Science of Love and the Insolence of Chance,” in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions,
ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 119–135. It is also worth
noting, here, that in 1969 Jean-Luc Godard released a film entitled Le gai savoir, which was re-titled
Joy of Learning when it was distributed outside France. In the film, a young man and a young
woman discuss language and the spoken word, which they designate as “the enemy,” in the eerie
space of an abandoned television studio. In a fine review of the film, the American film critic James
Monaco described Le gai savoir as Godard’s “ultimate effort at semioclasm” and the director’s first
“film d’role.” See James Monaco, “Le gai savoir: Picture and Act – Godard’s Plexus,” Jump Cut:
A Review of Contemporary Media 7 (1975): 15–17.
33
In 1993, an American PhD student was accorded a rare interview with Lacan’s second wife Sylvia
Maklès, in which she described her husband as someone who was handsome without being droll,
and someone who definitely could be funny when he ought to be. At the same time, she referred to
Chapsal as a vulgar person, who was hardly a “great woman” See Jamer Hunt, Absence to Presence:
The Life History of Sylvia [Bataille] Lacan (doctoral dissertation, Rice University, 1995), 177, 180.
50 dany nobus
more and more linguistic stunts as the years went by, whilst losing himself like
a five-year-old boy in the endless twists and turns of a crazy little thing called
the Borromean knot. Whether the people in his audience went through the
same hilarious experience, I am not sure.34 What we do know is that the
representatives of the psychoanalytic establishment and the guardians of the
institutions at which Lacan was “performing” did not always think that the
show was funny. The day is Monday November 7, 1955. In the United States,
the Supreme Court of Baltimore bans segregation in public recreational areas.
In Vienna, at the Neuropsychiatric clinic, Lacan is giving a lecture entitled “La
chose freudienne” (The Freudian Thing), in which he proclaims “Moi, la vérité
je parle” (I, truth, speak).35 Viennese psychiatrists and psychoanalysts really do
not like it when a French colleague says something like that.
But the tone was set at the beginning of his first public seminar at
Sainte-Anne. “The closer we get to psychoanalysis being funny [la psycha-
nalyse amusante],” Lacan said, “the more it is real psychoanalysis [la
véritable psychanalyse].”36 Maybe his audience at the time – which was
mainly made up of analysts-in-training – thought he was joking, but Lacan
himself was entirely serious about the importance of having fun. The next
year, he defined Hegel’s concept of “absolute knowledge” (savoir absolu) as
an “elaborated discourse,” which is used as an instrument of power by
self-identified masters, and he opposed it to the libidinal knowledge of the
street-corner, produced by those who are having a good time in the local
café listening to jazz music and dancing the night away. It is clear where his
heart was.37 Two years later, he said to his listeners that he was always
trying to end a lecture on something that would amuse them.38 And the
34
Jacques-Alain Miller, the official editor of Lacan’s seminars, could have included textual
interpositions such as [laughs] whenever the audience laughed at something Lacan was saying or
doing, but on that point the text is silent and arid. Recordings of the seminars generally contain too
much background noise for laughter in the audience to be discernable. When asked about his
encounters with Lacan, the French author Philippe Sollers, who attended Lacan’s seminars
throughout the late 1960s and 70s, has always insisted on Lacan’s great sense of humor. In
another interview, Jacques-Alain Miller stated that Lacan was “gay” until 1975–76 and that a great
many laughs were being had. See Philippe Sollers, Lacan même (Paris: Navarin, 2005); Philippe
Sollers, “Le corps sort de la voix,” Le diable probablement, 9 (2011): 16–28; Jacques-Alain Miller, “Le
démon de Lacan,” Le diable probablement 9 (2011): 29–171, 142 in particular.
35
Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in
Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 340.
36
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans.
John Forrester (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988), 77.
37
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge
38
See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre IV: La relation d’objet, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du
Seuil, 1994), 334.
year after, when focusing on the so-called formations of the unconscious,
he paid relatively little attention to dreams, bungled actions and neurotic
symptoms, but spent the entire first trimester talking about the “Freudian
structures” of the joke.39 At another point in this seminar, Lacan claimed
that he was not really having fun when playing on words (Je ne m’amuse
pas à jouer sur les mots).40 I think he was joking. There are numerous
other examples throughout the seminars and the written texts of things
that Lacan finds funny and amusing: the optical installation of the
inverted bouquet taken from Bouasse, Platonic dialogues, the works of
Lévi-Strauss, Sade, and Kant, topological structures, especially the cross-
cap, a little story about a giant praying mantis, a book by Leopold de
Saussure on Chinese astronomy, the golden section, T.S. Eliot’s “The
Waste Land,” the imagined jouissance of a plant. “I’m not giving any
lectures here,” he said to the crowd at his Seminar on February 9, 1972.
“As I have said elsewhere, very seriously, I’m amusing myself. Serious or
pleasant amusements.”41
At some point during his Seminar of 1968–69, Lacan revealed to his
audience that he was having a particularly good time and a great deal of fun
when being all on his own. What on earth was he doing? The day is Friday
June 30, 2006. In Pasadena, CA, an MTA bus hits and kills a five-year-old
girl riding a tricycle. In Paris a public auction is being held at the Hôtel
Marcel Dassault on the famous Champs-Elysées, during which 117 graphic
designs and unpublished manuscripts by Dr. Jacques Lacan are put up for
sale. The collection belongs to Jean-Michel Vappereau, a psychoanalyst
and mathematician who had worked with Lacan during the 1970s on the
development of his knot theory, and it is being auctioned because
Vappereau wants to buy an apartment in Paris to house a new archive of
psychoanalytic texts. Amongst the documents that are being sold, there are
numerous sheets of paper with colorful drawings of highly intricate knots,
which Lacan tended to refer to as his “ronds de ficelle,” as well as various
undated handwritten texts. One of the most interesting ones starts with
the line “Je n’ai dit que des sottises” (I’ve only ever said foolish things), and
39
See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
(Paris: du Seuil, 1998), 7–139. For all I know, this is the only seminar in which Lacan tells his
audience a proper joke – a story of a student and an examiner, which he has borrowed from
Raymond Queneau.
40
Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 344.
41
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XIX. . . . ou pire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 2011),
187. The “elsewhere” refers to a series of talks (entretiens) Lacan was giving in the chapel of the
Sainte-Anne Hospital, under the general title of “Le savoir du psychanalyste” (The knowledge of the
psychoanalyst). See Jacques Lacan, Je parle aux murs (Paris: du Seuil, 2011).
52 dany nobus
then goes on to show how Lacan is re-writing, in pseudo-Joycean fashion,
the sentence and its constitutive parts in a newly invented language, which
may still sound like French, but definitely no longer looks like French:
“jnédit kdessot’tise, kdesse ottise, jeûn’nez dit, jeun’nez dit quedès/quedesse.”
The same process is subsequently applied to the next section of the text, or
what now looks like the second stanza of a poem: “La pensée [thought],
ai-je une appensée?, Jnes padappe ansée, listerie, lister-ie, il faut que lister rie
[Lister laughs]. Isteron est du même ordre. Boufonnerie.” At the end of the
text, the rules of French grammar are restored, and a question is being
formulated: “Qu’est-ce que l’utérin a affaire dans l’hystérie. Grossesse nerveuse.
Et après.” (What does the uterine have to do with hysteria. Nervous
pregnancy. And afterwards).42 Anyone who is taking these scribbles
seriously is likely to react in one of two different ways, no doubt depending
on the quality of the transference toward Lacan. The first reaction is to say
that Lacan had finally lost it, that his writing, here, shows clear signs of a
pathologically deteriorating mind, which, although not necessarily
representative of a florid psychosis, has driven the man and his ideas
deeper and deeper into the darkest realms of a full-blown delusion. Lacan’s
writing here would come frightfully close, then, to the samples of “inspired
writing” by psychotic patients he himself had studied so carefully as a
psychiatrist during the 1930s.43 The second reaction would start from the
assumption that Lacan was actually entirely sane when he wrote the text,
and then proceed to an in-depth investigation of the meaning of it all, as if
the lines constitute an esoteric, hermetically locked set of words, whose real
and true meaning can only be found if we manage to locate the right key
for deciphering the document. I shall resist the temptation to pass judg-
ment on Lacan’s state of mind, but if we take the text not as the produc-
tion of a madman, then the second, hermeneutic, approach may in itself
not be all that productive either. Regardless as to whether one finds the key
to unlock the seal, the hermeneutic approach, which pokes at meaning and
values the enjoyment of the deciphering that is associated with it –
following Lacan’s own assertions in and on Television – exemplifies how
any type of “virtuous knowledge,” even the most playful and joyous
example, can be made to fall from grace and descend into sin, especially
when it is taken too seriously.
42
For a facsimile and transcription of the document, see Jacques Lacan, Œuvres graphiques et
manuscrits (Paris: Artcurial Briest, 2006), 42.
43
See, for example, Jacques Lévy-Valensi, Pierre Migault and Jacques Lacan, “Écrits ‘inspirés’:
Schizographie,” in De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, suivi de
Premiers écrits sur la paranoia (Paris: du Seuil, 1975), 365–382.
Maybe it is just better to assume that as a gay psychoanalyst Lacan was
having fun, enjoying himself, and extolling the virtues of gai saber.
Fantasist or not, he is bending over backwards to ensure that the
knowledge he is producing remains light-hearted. When he is
“demolishing” the French language – much like the surrealists were fond
of doing, or like his younger literary contemporaries Philippe Sollers and
Pierre Guyotat – enacting the content of the message (je n’ai dit que des
sottises) through the style with which it is executed, he is bending the rules
of grammar, turning syntax inside out, twisting words and sentences like
he is working on yet another transformation of the Borromean knot. For
Lacan, language and knowledge should be as flexible as a Möbius-strip, a
Klein bottle, or a cross-cap. That is what he recognized and appreciated in
the works of Rabelais, in the literary art of Baltasar Gracián, whose
inimitable talent for generating maximum effect with minimum words
was referred to as agudeza, or in the remarkable Bigarrures (variegations) of
Étienne Tabourot, the Seigneur des Accords, and of course also in the
books of James Joyce.44 Yet in pursuing gai saber, and avoiding any kind of
established, doctrinal knowledge production, Lacan was actually extremely
serious about where the true value of psychoanalysis can be found, and
what should become of knowledge when it enters the theory and practice
of psychoanalysis. As his formula for the discourse of the analyst indicates,
knowledge is held to operate on the place of truth, which does not mean
that psychoanalytic knowledge, as it is employed by the analyst in his or
her clinical practice, has to represent the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, but paradoxically that the knowledge “in action”
cannot be too serious, meaningful, and austere, so that it can evoke the
truth – much like the medieval court jester would always speak the truth
by never actually saying it.45 And when, in Television, Lacan posited that
the end of a psychoanalytic process is driven by the ethic of the “well-
spoken” (l’éthique du bien-dire), what he had in mind was not that
analysands at the end of their analysis would be more capable than before
44
The reference to Tabourot appears late in Lacan’s work, in the seminar L’insu-que-sait de l’une-bévue
s’aile à mourre, of 1976–77, and it shows, alongside the title of the Seminar, how Lacan, pace
Jacques-Alain Miller, was still pretty gay at the time. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XXIV: L’insu-
que-sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, unpublished, session of 11 January 1977. For a brief Lacanian
presentation of the Bigarrures, see Christian Vereecken, “Le gay sçavoir du seigneur des Accords,”
Quarto 26 (1987): 33–37. For Lacan’s yearlong 1975–76 seminar on Joyce, see Jacques Lacan, Le
Séminaire, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 2005).
45
On the discourse of the analyst, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Russell Grigg (New York NY-London:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).
54 dany nobus
to articulate their thoughts and emotions in a serious and correct fashion,
but rather that analysands would acquire the capacity to play on words, to
put their life into perspective, to see the humor of it all.46 As such, gai saber
is not just a theoretical flight of fancy for Lacan the fantasist, but also, and
much more fundamentally, a clinical principle, which lies at the heart of
psychoanalytic practice, psychoanalytic training, and psychoanalytic episte-
mology. It is related to what Nicolas of Cusa – who was not a troubadour
but a cardinal – designated as the docta ignorantia, the wise ignorance, but
it is also connected to the Freudian structure of the Witz, which much like
any joke can be seen as a linguistic attempt at destabilizing an established set
of expectations, or at steering existing mental and social structures in
surprising, unanticipated directions.47 As the anthropologist Mary Douglas
put it: “A joke is a play upon form that affords an opportunity for realizing
that an accepted pattern has no necessity.”48 It should not come as a
complete surprise, then, that Lacan at one point also defined psychoanalytic
interpretation as a Witz – not exactly a joke (and there is no evidence that
Lacan ever told jokes when conducting his analyses) but a quip, a wittiness,
a wordplay, a little piece of gay knowledge.49 Lacan could only hope that his
audience, and especially the psychoanalysts attending his seminars, would
be as gay as he was, that they would not become bogged down in the pursuit
of absolute knowledge and the quest for true meaning, that they would be
able to listen to his words like they were coming from the sonorous mouth
of a medieval troubadour, and that they would see the not-so-funny comedy
of their own existence, as dedicated followers of Jacques the Fantasist.
Episteme of laughter
Given Lacan’s lifelong commitment to gai saber, it would be inappropriate
to employ his theory as a firmly established, doctrinal body of knowledge,
46
Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, 22. See also Jacques-Alain Miller,
. . . du nouveau. Introduction au Séminaire V de Lacan (Paris: rue Huysmans, 1998), 12–13.
47
See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 8, trans. James Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1960).
48
Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London & New York: Routledge, 1975),
96.
49
See Jacques Lacan, Le phénomène lacanien (Nice: Section Clinique de Nice, 2011). On another
occasion, Lacan also suggested that the procedure of the pass – a controversial arrangement for
appointing new analysts – should be considered a Witz, or at least he used the structure of the Witz,
which crucially relies on what Freud called die Dritte Person (la troisième, the third), in order to
justify its precise structure. See Jacques Lacan, “Discours à l’École freudienne de Paris,” in Autres
Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 265.
and outright paradoxical to interpret his each and every word as a
definitive statement. During the 1950s, Lacan criticized the
representatives of ego-psychology not only for transforming Freud’s
invention into psycho-education and enlightened behaviorism, but also
for systematizing and “straightening” Freud’s ideas. Throughout his
career, he remained profoundly skeptical of the scientific ideal of the
integration of knowledge, truth and reality, and he consistently argued in
favor of a knowledge economy that is based on the principles of
uncertainty, undecidability, and incompletion. Instead of returning to
Freud in order to generate a new, coherent and consistent formalism,
Lacan campaigned for psychoanalysis to be re-gay-ed – for it to
re-establish itself as a new gaya scienza, for it to mellow its rigid concepts,
structures, practices, and procedures into a more light-hearted, open-
ended, playful, and altogether amusing set of ideas, for it to become less
scientific in the Teutonic sense, and more poetic in the Provençal sense,
for it to stop worrying about social conventions and public respectability,
for it to be intrinsically suspicious of customary practices; in short, for it
to have fun. As such, Lacan intended to contribute to the (re-)invention
of psychoanalysis as a new episteme of laughter or, better still, as a
laughing episteme – a sensual, passionate, “affected knowledge,” which
can be worn lightly, and whose playful permutations of words and ideas
may generate unexpected new discoveries.50
Unlike Lacan, Freud never disclosed in public that he was “fröhlich,”
and although he admitted in his autobiographical study that Nietzsche’s
“guesses and intuitions [Ahnungen und Einsichten] often agree in the
most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis,”
there is no evidence that Freud ever paid much attention to The Gay
50
If there is an echo of Spinoza in all of this, then it is definitely not accidental. Whereas most
teenagers would decorate the walls of their room with posters of their favorite pop-stars, at the age of
sixteen Lacan preferred a self-designed diagram outlining the structure of Spinoza’s Ethics. For his
doctoral thesis, he chose proposition 57 of the third book of the Ethics as an epigraph. When, at the
Maison de la Chimie and in Television, he opposed gaiety to sadness, he clearly alluded to Spinoza’s
two fundamental emotions of laetitia and tristitia. In addition, when Nietzsche started making notes
for Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft in the Summer of 1881, he wrote to his friend Franz Overbeck about
his indebtedness to the Dutch philosopher, and about the important task of “making knowledge the
most powerful affect” (die Erkenntniß zum mächtigsten Affekt zu machen). By contrast with Spinoza,
for whom knowledge is intrinsically joyful because it grants power over life, Nietzsche believed that
knowledge is primarily painful, so that joyful knowledge is a philosophical assignment rather than
an epistemic given. See Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 11 and 52–53; Jacques Lacan, De la
psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, 11; Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans.
Edwin Curley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996); Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich
Nietzsche (Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1996), 177.
56 dany nobus
Science.51 Nonetheless, Freud was the first psychoanalyst, and for many
years the only psychoanalyst, to give serious consideration to the
structure and function of jokes, and in his works he often made use
of irony and sarcasm to drive his points home. When, in 1926, the
American writer Max Eastman visited Freud in Vienna, and the great
man walked through the door to greet him, he was surprised that “he
was smaller” than expected, and “slender-limbed, and more feminine,”
and with a flatter nose than expected, and with a gentle voice. But
Eastman particularly picked up on the fact that Freud smiled a lot,
seemed quite amused a lot of the time, and would sometimes throw his
head way back and laugh like a child.52 It is not an image of Freud that
one would ever get from the numerous “official” photographs of him
that have entered the cultural domain over the years. Indeed, there is
hardly a single photograph of Freud in which he can be seen laughing.
For the later pictures, this may be explained with reference to the
cancerous growth in his mouth and the cheek prosthesis he was forced
to wear, but for all the others it may no doubt also be attributed to the
public image of gravitas that he was expected (and to some extent also
wanted) to maintain. In a sense, one could argue that the official
photographs were meant to capture the serious-mindedness of the
“institutional Freud,” the Freud who approached the psychoanalytic
study of the mind with authority, dignity, and respect, even if the
results of his research were challenging, controversial, and scandalous.
It is precisely in this discrepancy between the private intellectual
playfulness of one or more passionate, enthusiastic soul-searchers and the
constant institutional quest for the public recognition of a firmly grounded
doctrine that the problem of psychoanalytic knowledge needs to be
situated. Were I to choose a psychoanalytic concept to “diagnose” the
current and historical state of the knowledge operating within psychoana-
lytic institutions, it would have to be the good old Freudian notion of
“disavowal” (Verleugnung), which he employed to characterize the attitude
of the male fetishist toward castration, and which the French psychoana-
lyst Octave Mannoni brilliantly captured with the phrase “I know very
51
Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 20, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1959), 60. For a detailed study of Freud’s indebtedness to Nietzsche
and the Nietzschean themes in his work, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, trans.
Richard L. Collier Jr. (London: Athlone, 2000).
52
See Max Eastman, Heroes I Have Known: Twelve who Lived Great Lives (New York NY: Simon &
Schuster, 1942), 261–273.
well, but still.. . .” (Je sais bien, mais quand même).53 As a “gay
psychoanalyst” Lacan too has to some extent been the unwilling victim
of this type of institutional straightening, with its organizational epistemic
disavowal. In a thought-provoking paper on the hugely problematic
psychoanalytic concept of perversion, Tim Dean has demonstrated, for
example, how Lacan’s theoretical and practical celebration of division,
fracture, and dehiscence, as well as his critical opposition to any form of
subjective identity, which has effectively allowed for his ideas to be
recuperated within the anti-identitarian configurations of queer theory,
have regularly been re-adjusted into a set of formalistic normative
categories and a hetero-centric logic of sexual identity.54 In Rome, in
1974, and elsewhere Lacan was rather exasperated when he felt the need
to remind people that he had been a clown on television. It is rather
exasperating that Lacan’s “I am gay” – although it could easily be dismissed
as a passing remark, an insignificant punctuation, a momentary lapse of
reason, or an extremely succinct para-textual digression – never seems to
have been taken very seriously.
There is no evidence that Lacan ever read Nietzsche’s Fröhliche Wis-
senschaft, but if he had, he would definitely have picked up on the
following “aphorism”: “For most people, the intellect is an awkward,
gloomy, creaking machine that is hard to start: when they want to work
with this machine and think well, they call it ‘taking the matter seriously’ –
oh, how taxing good thinking must be for them! The lovely human beast
seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well; it becomes ‘serious’! And
‘where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing’ – that
is the prejudice of this serious beast against all ‘gay science.’ Well then, let
us prove it a prejudice!”55 The paragraph echoes something Nietzsche had
already written in the introduction to his book: “[Y]ou will never find
someone who could completely mock you . . . To laugh at oneself as one
would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth – for that, not
even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had
far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future – when the
53
See Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 147–157; Octave Mannoni, “I Know Well, But All the Same . . .,” trans. G.
M. Goshgarian in Perversion and the Social Relation, eds. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster,
and Slavoj Žižek (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 68–92.
54
See Tim Dean, “The Frozen Countenance of the Perversions,” Parallax 14.2 (2008): 93–114 and 108,
in particular.
55
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 182–183.
58 dany nobus
proposition ‘The species is everything, an individual is always nothing’
has become part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsi-
bility is accessible to everyone at all times. Perhaps laughter will then
have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only ‘gay science’ will
remain.”56 Not too long after writing these lines, Nietzsche collapsed
physically and mentally, and never recovered his sanity. Sixty years later,
Dr. Jacques Lacan put on a hairy, ginger-colored wig and invited a young
woman to dance.
W O RK S CI T ED
Chapsal, Madeleine. “Jacques Lacan.” In Envoyez La Petite Musique. . .. Paris:
Grasset, 1984, pp. 29–54.
Douglas, Mary. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London & New York:
Routledge, 1975.
Dragonetti, Roger. Le gai savoir dans la rhétorique courtoise. Flamenca et Joufroi de
Poitiers. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982.
Freud, Sigmund. “An Autobiographical Study.” In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 20. Translated by James
Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1959, pp. 1–74.
Gaunt, Simon, and Sarah Kay, eds. The Troubadours: An Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Kaufmann, Walter. ‘Translator’s introduction’ to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by
Walter Kaufmann New York: Vintage, 1974.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse, 1965–66,
unpublished.
“Discours de clôture des journées sur les psychoses.” Recherches, 8 (1968):
143–150.
The Seminar. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York & London: W.W. Norton
& Co. 1988.
The Seminar. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Sylvana
Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
“Television.” In Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.
Edited by Joan Copjec. Translated by Denis Hollier et al. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1990, pp. 3–46.
Le Séminaire. Livre IV: La relation d’objet. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris:
du Seuil, 1994.
56
Ibid., 27–28.
Miller. Paris: du Seuil, 1998.
“Lituraterre.” In Autres écrits. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 2001, pp. 11–19.
“Discours de Rome.” In Autres écrits. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 2001,
pp. 133–164.
“L’étourdit.” In Autres écrits. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 2001, pp. 449–495.
“The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in
Psychoanalysis.” In Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York &
London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, pp. 334–363.
The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
and trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
Le Séminaire. Livre XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: du Seuil, 2006.
Eastman, Max. Heroes I Have Known: Twelve who Lived Great Lives. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1942.
Œuvres graphiques et manuscrits. Paris: Artcurial Briest, 2006.
Le Séminaire. Livre XIX. . . . ou pire. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: du
Seuil, 2011.
“La troisième.” La cause freudienne, 79 (September 2011): 11–33.
Mannoni, Octave. “I Know Well, but All the Same. . .” Translated by GM
Goshgarian. In Perversion and the Social Relation. Edited by Molly Anne
Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Zizek. Durham NC & London,
Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 68–92.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix
of Songs. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and poems translated by Adrian
Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
“Ecce Homo: How To Become What You Are.” In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo,
Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings. Translated by Judith Norman.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 69–151.
Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York &
London: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Williams, Bernard. “Introduction,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with
a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Josefine
Nauckhoff, poems translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge
chapter 3
Laughing about nothing

Democritus and Lacan
Patricia Gherovici
“The more saints, the more laughter; that’s my principle, to wit, the way
out of capitalist discourse. . .”
Jacques Lacan, Television.
Why was Democritus laughing while Heraclitus was weeping? Tradition

has kept that double image, and the Greek philosopher’s uncontrollable
hilarity has been a source of inspiration for thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx
and Jacques Lacan. We remember that Democritus, famous since
antiquity as the “laughing” philosopher, was one of the first Greek materi-
alists, and that the young Marx wrote a doctoral dissertation partly on him
(Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature1).
Marx tried to rethink the ontology implied in the materialism of Democri-
tus: his atomism was predicated on the concept of an invisible matter, for
indeed, Democritus’ atoms were too small to be visible. Following Marx,
Lacan complicated further the notion of matter and materialism when he
argued for a materalism of language. I will return to these Lacanian
concepts and to their incorporation of a certain jouissance at the core of
such an obstrusive hilarity in due time, starting first from the various
images provided for Democritus’ comic countenance.
Democritus’ irrepressible hilarity has been a recurrent visual topos, a
topic treated by numerous painters. Velázquez, Rubens, de Ribera, Rem-
brandt and many others decided to paint the mirthful philosopher.
Looking at the abundant and often superb portraits, one cannot help
wondering: what was Democritus laughing about? What type of laughter
would seize him so regularly? It could be a light, juvenile laughter, like that
Rembrandt evoked, it could be a roaring laughter, as Hendrick ter Brug-
ghen imagined it. It could be a seraphic smile, as in Carracci’s portrait, or a
1
Marx's doctoral dissertation Differenz der demokratischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie was
accepted by the University of Jena in 1841. See Karl Marx, The First Writings of Karl Marx, ed.
Paul M. Schafer (Brooklyn, NY: lg Publishing, 2006.)
60
Laughing about nothing: Democritus and Lacan 61
gleeful chuckle, as envisaged by Johannes Moreelse? Rubens understood it
as a snigger, but for Ribera, it was closer to a giggle, whereas for Velazquez
it was a mere titter and for Antoine Coypel, a more cynical snicker.
Perhaps a simple and direct smile like the one that came off Giordano’s
brush captured it best. At any rate, it is revealing that when Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing criticized the picture of materialist philosopher Julien
Offray de La Mettri as a laughing Democritus, Lessing saw the gaping
mouth as a hole that he found disturbing, repulsive even, to such a point
that he argued that this kind of image could fill the spectator with “disgust
and horror.” Lessing objected to this stark representation of a laughing
mouth in line with his classical ideas about aesthetics: “Democritus seems
to be laughing only the first few times you look at him. Look at him more
often and the philosopher turns into a fop. His laugh becomes a grin.”2
Moreover, we can note that in many pictorial depictions of Democritus
and Democritus look-alikes, crumpled faces and contorted mouths suggest
both joy or pain in equal measure. The distorted features of Democritus’
face evoke an indistinguishable mixture of both, which sends us back to
one of Lacan’s main concepts, a jouissance combining pleasure and pain.
We can then ask not only what causes this laughter but where such a
jouissance may have come from. In our quest for a more elusive cause, we
should begin by reconstructing a genealogy of Democritus’ laughter; there
again, we will be helped by the literary and philosophical tradition. The
earliest reference to a laughing Democritus comes from Horace whose
14 BC Epistolarum liber secundus mentions: “Si foret in terris, rideret
Democritus,” meaning: “If Democritus were on earth, he would laugh.”
Had Democritus been still alive, he would mock his fellow citizens and
castigate their follies. For another Horace, Horace Walpole, Democritus’
very laugh revealed a full method: “I have often said, and oftener think,
that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that
feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.”3 This
became Walpole’s favorite saying , oft repeated in his letters. It is echoed in
a statement attributed to Jean de La Bruyère: “Life is a tragedy for those
who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” On this view, Democritus
would laugh just because he thought, and he would have ushered in a
variation on Descartes’s cogito, his cogito leading to an ergo rideo: I think
therefore I laugh.
2
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore and
London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 20.
3
Letter to Sir Horace Mann, December 31, 1769.
62 patricia gherovici
Another explanation of Democritus’ laughter is to be found in the
works of Sotion at the beginning of our era. In this version, Democritus
is accompanied by a crying companion, Heraclitus of Ephese. The litera-
ture and iconography devoted to this odd couple is prodigious. From
Erasmus to Beckett via Montaigne, Walter Scott, Lope de Vega, van
Heemskerck the Elder, ter Brugghen, Rubens, and many others, we
encounter the Laurel and Hardy of philosophy – “Heraclitus, who cries,”
coupled with “Democritus, who laughs.”
Sotion examined Democritus in the context of an exploration of anger.
It makes sense, then, that Seneca, a disciple of Sotion, emphasized Dem-
ocritus’ mockery. The fact that Democritus could not contain his laughter
would have betrayed his contempt for the state of things; such a laughter
implied therefore a whole critique.4 Thus Seneca contended that Democri-
tus did not get angry: he would just laugh it off. Democritus’ laughing
propensities, his finding his surroundings worthy of ridicule or derision,
earned him the reputation for being mad. Because they were unable to
laugh with him, his fellow citizens saw his laughter as an indication of
insanity, for, as the proverb goes, he who laughs alone is mad.
Democritus may have had good reason to laugh. In fact, he was not the
only one laughing. His city, the town of Abdera, was the butt of many
jokes in Antiquity. Abdera was a city of fools and stupid people, its
neighbors thought. Foolish as they may have been, the citizens of Abdera
relied on experts – they summoned the help of Hippocrates to cure the
philosopher. This “consultation” was recorded in the apocryphal letters
between Hippocrates and the citizens of Abdera. If the people of Abdera
called Democritus “the mocker,” they also worried that it was a disease that
was keeping the philosopher awake; only sickness would make him laugh
about all and everything.5
In fact, happily, Democritus didn’t spend all his time laughing; he also
spent some time dissecting animals, which is what he was doing when
Hippocrates arrived and found Democritus sitting under a tree, of course,
once more roaring with laughter. Hippocrates was going to administer
hellebore, a purgative and diuretic agent thought to ward off mental
diseases not realizing that hellebore itself would have driven Democritus
crazy. The reason Democritus was sitting under this tree opening up
4
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 50.
5
See Wesley D. Smith, Pseudepigraphic Writing: Letters-Embassy-Speech from the Altar-Decree (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1990), 67; and Owsei Temkin, Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and Christians (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 61–71.
animals was to discover the truth about humors. He was busy looking for
the black bile of melancholy because, like most of his contemporaries, he
thought that an excess of bile caused insanity. The head, they all believed,
was the seat of reason, the heart, of anger, and the liver, of desire. Asked by
Hippocrates what he was working on, Democritus answered, “on mad-
ness.” The philosopher was mocking the doctor who thought he could
cure madness with a potentially poisonous herb. Hippocrates seemed to
have forgotten his eponymous oath “Primun non nocere,” (“first, do no
harm”), persuaded by the fools of Abdera of Democritus’ lunacy, he was
too ready to administer hellebore before exploring what made the sup-
posedly mad philosopher laugh.
After they had a conversation, Hippocrates was disarmed by the cour-
tesy and obvious sanity of the philosopher. He even found Democritus’
laughter justified. The people of Abdera, Hippocrates concluded, were the
insane ones and Democritus was not mad; he was the wisest man living.
Hippocrates, full of admiration for the thinker, understood that Democri-
tus’ laughter had a philosophical character: it evinced maturity and
betrayed a deep awareness of absurdity. Democritus was not insane but
“virtually a god,” and his wisdom would teach others to be “true and
decent.”6 Many commentators have argued that at that moment Democri-
tus converted Hippocrates to Cynicism. Whether that is true or not, the
“risus sardonicus,” which is medical jargon for a sustained spasm of the
face muscles that appears to produce a grin, is also called a
Hippocratic Smile.
Whatever caused it, Democritus’ immoderate laughter was not an
insane laughter. His laughter was directed at everything, joyous or sad.
He could not stop laughing at the folly of the world. For Robert Burton,
who first published his Anatomy of Melancholy under the pen name
Democritus Junior, this encounter was of the highest importance. Burton
believed that Democritus was a melancholic who had studied his own
ailment. Laughter, Burton argued, was the cure. In Burton’s view, laughter
is remedial – it provides a safety valve or relief for the individual while
reasserting a social ideal or even a utopian standard.
Let us return for a moment to the meeting between the physician and
the philosopher. Wesley D. Smith invites us to consider Democritus not as
a hermit but rather “as an eccentric aristocrat on his country estate.” He
describes the scene of the encounter as marked by “touches of comedy of
6
See Wesley D. Smith, Pseudepigraphic Writing: Letters-Embassy-Speech from the Altar-Decree
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 22.
manners.”7 When Hippocrates asked Democritus why he laughed, Dem-
ocritus replied with the standard cynic indictment of humanity: “You
think that there are two causes for my laughter, good things and bad.
But I laugh at one thing, humanity, brimming with ignorance, void of
right action, childish in all aspirations. . .”8 For Democritus, therefore, it
was the human condition itself that was laughable.
What if, instead of laughing at human follies, instead of deriding the
absurdity of the universe, Democritus was laughing at – nothing? Wrongly
accused of being mad for laughing at everything, he might have been
laughing at something that was nothing, or more precisely, at less than
nothing, an atom of nothing. This is what Lacan suggested when he referred
to Democritus in Seminar XI. Lacan’s discussion is found in a passage
devoted to the Aristotelian couple of tuché and automaton. At
the beginning of this chapter Lacan defines tuché as “the encounter with the
real.”9 Notice that it is an accident that determines this encounter: “If the
development is entirely animated by accident, by the obstacle of the tuché, it
is in so far as the tuché brings us back to the same at which pre-Socratic
philosophy sought to motivate the world itself. It required a clinamen, an
inclination, at some point. When Democritus tried to designate it . . . he
says. . . it is not a meden but a den, which in Greek is a coined word. . . .
Nothing perhaps? – not perhaps nothing but not nothing.”10 The discussion
that follows is complex, as Madlen Dolar has noticed, because it combines in
one single paragraph key concepts of different philosophers, Aristotle
(“tuché”), Epicurus and Lucretius (“clinamen”) and Democritus (the
famous “den”). Lacan seems to tackle all at once Being and non-Being, the
One and the Void, negativity, contingency, repetition, and the entangled
connections between materialism and idealism. Dolar wonders whether
these interwoven themes can be thought together. He adds that, from a
traditional academic perspective, Lacan’s conceptual splicing could be seen
as “unscrupulous” and even “sinful.”11 But Lacan’s alleged transgression has a
purpose. As Dolar has noted elsewhere, Democritus thinks the atom not as a
body, not as an entity, not as a one, not as Being, but also not as non-Being,
7
Smith, ed. and transl. Pseudepigraphic Writing: Letters-Embassy-Speech from the Altar-Decree, 23.
8
Ibid., 81. See also Z. Stewart, “Democritus and the Cynics,” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
63 (1958): 179–191.
9
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 53.
10
Ibid., 63–64. Italics in the original.
11
See Madlen Dolar, “Tuché, clinamen, den,” in Savoirs et clinique: Jacques Lacan, matérialiste: Le
symptôme dans la psychanalyse, les Lettres et la politique 16 (March 2013): 140–151. Unless otherwise
indicated all translations are the author’s.
and surmises that such a departure from all types of ontology puts Lacan on
the track to the object a, which is really the object of psychoanalysis.12 This
passage revisits Democritus’ physics of the nothing as a passage toward the
mightly absent object of psychoanalysis. Indeed, “Nothing is more real than
nothing” or “Naught is more real than aught,” was one of the philosopher’s
favorite maxims.
Lacan alluded to the fact that in his atomist doctrine, Democritus used a
neologism, “den.” As a negation of hen (one), Ancient Greeks had two words
for nothing, ouden which refers to factual negation, something could not
have been, and meden something that, in principle, cannot be. “Den” is a
malapromism, a nothing without the “no.” Slavoj Žižek describes it as a
“something but still within the domain of nothing, like an ontological living
dead, a spectral – nothing-appearing-as-something” 13 Žižek suggested that
since “meden” literally means “not one,” it would be better to translate “den”
as “otone,” or “tone.” Or as Lacan put it, “Nothing perhaps? – not perhaps
nothing but not nothing.”14 Barbara Cassin wishes that Lacan would have
made Democritus say “Not nothing but less than nothing.”15
If Lacan insists on the concept of “den” put forward by Democritus in
Seminar XI, it is because he finds another point of analogy: atoms, for
Democritus, are like letters, which, combined into sentences, can be joined
to form volumes. Lacan then uses the Lucretian clinamen to work through
the logic of trauma. If we agree to take the deviation that upsets a
preceding equilibrium as tuché, or an effect of the clinamen, this concep-
tion introduces turbulence into an unconscious “structured like a lan-
guage.” By introducing chance, turbulence makes of the unconscious a
less closed system. If we can speak at all, it is because of this deviation. The
clinamen introduces a breakup of order, and thus is radically opposed to
repetition. Michel Serres suggests, “meaning is a bifurcation of univo-
city”16 translated as “sense is a bifurcation in the unequivocal.”17 Turbu-
lence disturbs repetition by troubling the flow of the identical; it pulls and
12
See Madlen Dolar, “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik ,
Volume XXXIV, Number 2 (2013): 11–26.
13
Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso,
2012), 59. Italics in the original.
14
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 64. Italics in the
original.
15
Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: Deux leçons sur “L’ étourdit” de Lacan
(Paris: Fayard, 2010), 82.
16
Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et turbulence (Paris:
Minuit, 1977), 179.
17
Michael Serres, The Birth of Physics, ed. David Webb and trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2000), 145.
pushes in the same way as the symptom does. Psychoanalytic work, for
instance, uses turbulence in a deliberate practice of equivocation and verbal
punning so as to undo the set of fixed and univocal meanings initially
presented by the analysand.
Lacan returns a second time to Democritus, or more precisely, to what
he calls “Democritus’ joke,” to conclude his 1972 text L’ étourdit. I quote
this section that leaves us in a state of astonishment, a state well conjured
up by the essay’s very title, L’étourdit, for if written without the final “t,” it
means “the bungler,” which was the title of Molière’s first comedy—a
hilarious comedy of errors close to the commedia dell’arte that for Victor
Hugo was Molière’s best comic play. Here is Lacan in his own L’étourdit
(with a final “t” this time so as to suggest the dimension of saying, dit):
That won’t mark any progress, since there is no progress without regret, a
regret for some loss. But that one can laugh about it, the language I am the
servant of finds itself repeating the joke* of Democritus on the meden:
extracting via a fall of the me- of (negation of) the nothing that apparently
calls for it, this is how our Francophone gang speaks in its wake.
Democritus, indeed, gave us as a gift, the atomos of the radical real, by
eliding the me- or not, but in a subjunctive mode, that is in this modal
whose demand reinstates consideration. Because of this the den really
became the stowaway (passager clandestin) whose clam* seals our destiny.18
This dense passage includes two English words, “joke” and “clam,” the
latter used in a pun on “clandestin” (meaning “clandestine”) echoing as a
compound of “clam” and “destiny.” Our fate would be sealed like the
hemetic bivalve glued to its rock. Should we imagine this clam happy, as
Camus tried to imagine Sisyphus happy? This is not so sure, for Lacan
warns us that “There is no progress.” In fact, there is only loss and regret;
however, loss itself can elicit laughter. Here is where Democritus’ joke
resides. One can extract a modicum of pleasure from loss. Lacan’s digres-
sion on the negative implied by “den” rests on a French idiom, the ne
explétif, a formal grammatical pattern used in a negative statement, which
is also a non-negative for it has no negative value in and of itself and “does
not contribute to the meaning of the sentence and is not required by
syntax.”19 It is often used in situations where the main clause has a negative
meaning (either negative-bad or negative-negated), also in expressions
denoting anxiety, fear, warning, doubt, and so on. This “empty sign,”
* Words in Italics in English in the original text.

18
Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 494.
19
According to the Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française.
which has been described as “redundant” and as a “parasistic particle” has
been discussed by Lacan (following the French grammarians Damourette
and Pichon) as the “ne discordantiel. ”20 If this sounds confusing to non-
French speakers, notice that the same pattern is repeated with the neolo-
gism “den.” Dolar asks: “What is this entity, den . . . is it not precisely the
object we are after? What is den the name of—object a ?”21 The same
conclusion is reached by Žižek, who writes that the “den” is mentioned by
Lacan because it is homologous to the object cause of desire, the so-called
object a. Both the subject and the object a would emerge when alienation
is followed by separation. “Den” would be the invisible remainder of the
signifying process of double negation which according to Dolar is no
longer a negation but rather “the decapitation of nothing” or what Badiou
would call “subtraction.”22
Indeed, the neologism “den,” as Dolar points out, has been a headache
for classical philologists.23 Leaving aside its etymological obscurity, one can
state that according to Lacan’s reading, a nothing (rien) can cause laughter
(rire). Thus Democritus’ joke would be contained in a new word, an
invented word amounting to less than nothing. This “Not something,
not nothing, not being, not one, not positively existing, not absent, not
countable” would be an atom pointing to the radical Real. Here would be
the nearest philosophical approximation of Lacan’s main theoretical inven-
tion: the object a. This “invention” was designated by Lacan with a single
letter – like an algebraic sign – so as to represent a lost object invested with
drives, the unattainable object which causes desire.
Cassin and Badiou thus read the “den” as the name of an invented
signifier without signified or referent. It would be a pure letter, the clam
containing the hidden pearl of L’étourdit. They refer to a comment in
Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore, a propos of Democritus and the atoms
considered here as elements of floating signification or “flying signifier-
ness,”24 Lacan introduces in this passage the jouissance of the body in the
absence of the sexual rapport, which led Christian Fierens to see in the
clandestine destiny of the clam the poinçon, the diamond, that is Lacan’s
matheme of the formula of fantasy. It conceals the chimerical function
of the object a – an object which functions better hidden than seen.
20
See “The French ne expletive, a vestige of mê” Dictionary of Unstranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,
ed. Barbara Cassin and trans. and ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2015), 321.
21
Dolar, “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan,” 23. 22
Ibid. 23
Ibid., 22.
24
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge,
trans. Bruce Fink and ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), 71.
Thus if this “less than nothing” is revealed, one experiences anxiety, or, in
some cases, laughter. In consequence of which I will offer a clinical
vignette showing that Hippocrates had a point when he took Democritus
as someone who could cure “madness.”
This patient, whom I will call Mercedes, moved to the United States
from Mexico almost a decade ago. She is a middle-class professional
woman in her 50s, an anthropologist by training who works as a Spanish
instructor. In a recent session, she announced that she was very happy; she
had found a new activity – yoga lessons taught in a beautiful studio. The
teacher could not be better. There was, however, a small problem. Her
favorite class was also attended by a group of ladies in their 60s; una ganga
de gordas, as she called them, a gang of fat ladies. This well-off, bourgeois
group had been practicing at the studio for years. Despite Mercedes’
enthusiasm for yoga, my analysand felt that because of one lady in
particular, she could no longer enjoy the yoga classes.
This lady, my analysand suspected, was Jewish. “I did not know there
were so many Jews in this part of town,” Mercedes told me. “I noticed they
were telling each other, ‘Happy New Year,’ for the Jewish holiday, and
I understood. And then, just before the yoga practice was about to start,
this woman put her yoga mat exactly where I wanted to be – diagonally
placed, just behind the instructor. The lady wanted to be in front of the
mirror, and very rudely told me: ‘Excuse me, this is my spot.’ She was very
unpleasant and made me feel I can no longer go to that yoga class as long as
she is going to be there.” “I came home very upset,” Mercedes continued,
“and told my husband, who said, ‘Yes, that’s how Jews are, very selfish.’”
“It looks like the yoga studio is full of Jews; I can no longer go there.” She
regretted this. The studio “is just a nice place, clean, beautiful, peaceful,
relaxing. . .the yoga class was so nice.”
Initially, I was put off by Mercedes’ bigotry. Then I wondered: what is
Mercedes really talking about? I found it helpful to engage the work of
Slavoj Žižek to better understand Mercedes’ predicament. Specifically,
I took a closer look at Žižek’s analysis of racism.25 Žižek talks about the
political significance of the racist fantasy. How does this fantasy tie into the
Lacanian notion of jouissance?
Jouissance is a word that does not translate easily into English. Lacan
suggested that we understand jouissance as a combination of “enjoyment”
and “lust.” Jouissance is also equivocal in French. It is a form of
enjoyment not necessarily accompanied by pleasure or joy. Often, in
25
See Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 124–128.
the experience of jouissance, pain and pleasure are indistinguishable.
Jouissance conveys the enjoyment of an object, but an enjoyment not
simply yielding advantageous returns or results; rather, it produces not a
gratifying surplus benefit, but a violent, climactic bliss closer to loss,
death, fragmentation, and the disruptive rapture experienced when trans-
gressing limits.
Let us review Mercedes’ predicament in the context of our discussion
here. In her yoga class, Mercedes encountered a Jewish woman who
wanted to steal her place. This Jewish woman, the “other,” wanted to
rob Mercedes of her den, her nothing. This Jewish woman wanted to rob
Mercedes of her newfound pleasure, the wonderful yoga class.
How did Mercedes react? She went home and discussed the events with
her husband. Together they constructed an “ethnic other” responsible for
this theft. Mercedes and her husband agreed that all Jews have access to
some strange jouissance, a “Jewsance” one might be tempted to write. In
other words, they agreed that all Jews are selfish. “They” – the Jews – do
not do things like “us” – the non-Jews. In their mind, not only did the
Jews seem to enjoy themselves in some alien and unfamiliar manner, but
in doing so they also spoiled their fun. Remember, my analysand felt that
she could no longer attend her favorite yoga class.
Here is how I intervened. First, I identified the fundamental problem at
work: Mercedes created a racist fantasy in which an “other’s” enjoyment is
inversely proportional to her own. The Jewish lady experienced a surplus
gain when she placed her yoga mat in front of Mercedes’ mat. The yoga
instructor would now notice the Jewish lady more during the practice.
This was all very clear to a paranoid Mercedes.
Note that Mercedes initially believed she could not become a member
of this particular yoga studio. Mercedes told me that she had walked by the
yoga studio several times before eventually joining. During those walks,
she could not imagine that it would be a friendly studio. Surely, she would
not belong in a place that looked so pretty. As such, she was overwhelmed
by the intensity of the pleasure (her jouissance) associated with practice at
this studio.
When she finally joined, Mercedes’ enduring fear of not fitting in was
experienced as a threat – a threat she then projected onto the Jewish lady.
Mercedes held onto the idea that she did not belong in the yoga studio.
The Jewish lady became a manifestation of this threat. Now, Mercedes
thought, she could no longer take the class she loved. The risk of enjoying
“too much” (yoga, acceptance, etc.) was regulated by the Jewish lady, an
“other” who took pleasure in excluding Mercedes from the fun.
I exchanged jokes with Mercedes with the intent to address the jouis-
sance she had projected onto the Jewish lady. During one session, Mer-
cedes referred to the group of Jewish women as una ganga de gordas, a gang
of fat ladies, and went on and on describing what terrible manners they
had and how rude they were. “La horda de las gordas,” “the horde of fat
ladies,” I replied. She laughed, then quipped back, “las gordas primitivas,”
“the primal fat ladies.” She was referring to the Darwinian myth revisited
by Freud in Totem and Taboo. She was also playing on the homophony in
Spanish between primal horde and primal fat lady. We both laughed.
Maybe I had taken up François Roustang’s challenge; did I make the
paranoid laugh? Mercedes’ paranoid reaction to the Jewish lady was in fact
a strategy of deferral – she postponed access to her jouissance; this
postponement exhibits the structural function of racism as a regulator of
enjoyment. Her fantasy was a screen to cover over an abyss. There was
nothing behind it; it was only a matter of time before she would detect the
imperfections in the yoga studio. Indeed, she had employed similar strat-
egies of deferral in the past. After a burst of early enthusiasm, she had
found the instructors of a spinning class to be “generally cold, not very
friendly, and with an attitude.” In another instance, she had found a new
job utterly miserable after initially raving about it.
Insofar as Mercedes was able to fantasize that the Jewish lady was
stealing her enjoyment, she could protect this place as an ideal place.
The yoga studio could be preserved at a distance as her favorite yoga
studio, the most beautiful studio, but one from which she is excluded.
“If only the ‘others’ weren’t here,” she thought, “everything would be
perfect, and society would become harmonious again.” “If only the Jewish
lady would settle elsewhere in the studio, I could finally enjoy myself.”
This inner dialogue draws from the same well of stale water, which
ultimately sustains all forms of racism. From this well emerges the illusion
of a perfect society, which is obviously impossible. The logic of exclusion
requires a problematic “other,” an embodiment of imperfection.
Mercedes identified the “other,” the rude Jewish lady, to maintain the
fantasy of a perfect situation, an ideal yoga studio. Her fantasy of an ideal
yoga studio was predicated on her exclusion from it. With her fantasy
intact, Mercedes could avoid the upheaval that jouissance entailed for her.
My gamble with this analysand was this: address the jouissance she
experienced. Behold the jouissance in all its threatening plenitude.
I wanted to introduce Mercedes to a tolerance of imperfection. I wanted
her to enter a world in which satisfaction is scarce. There could not be a
complete something. A perfect yoga studio would not be open for
membership, to her or the Jewish lady, or anyone else. For Mercedes to
practice yoga at this imperfect studio was to simultaneously accept a
measure of dissatisfaction without her racist fantasy in its place. Her
enthusiasm about the yoga class confronted her with an almost unbearable
plenitude.
Rather than using the usual hysteric strategy of finding a “hole,” a defect
(the classes were too long, the studio wasn’t so clean) to make it tolerable,
Mercedes became the hole itself and projected it onto the persecutory
“other” (the Jewish lady). In her racist fantasy, the “other” excludes her
from her enjoyment. “If not for the Jewish lady, this yoga studio would be
perfect.” I wanted Mercedes to recognize that the excess she projected onto
the “other” concealed the truth of her own failed enjoyment. It was only
when she accepted this inconvenient and limiting dynamic that she could
achieve some agency. Through treatment, she finally achieved a modicum
of freedom from the symptom. In the lighthearted elation of exchange,
Mercedes accessed the liberating power of laughter, the power of laughing
at “Nothing perhaps? Not perhaps nothing but not nothing.”
Freud claimed that he “succeeded where the paranoid failed.” In
response, Groddeck wrote to Ferenczi “Let us hope that he hasn’t forgot-
ten how to laugh.”26 This is indeed what Mercedes had done. She had
moved away from a paranoid fixation without, for all that, being stuck in
an endless laughter. As we saw with Democritus, the point of the laughing
philosopher is that his expression remains undecidable. Such an undecid-
ability is the best weapon against the frozen armor of symptoms and the
reduction of signs to fixed meanings. Mercedes’ laughter was proving the
importance of the Nothing, for as Beckett writes, quoting once more
Democritus identified by “the guffaw of the Abderite,” it is a Nothing
“than which naught is more real.” 27 Indeed, Mercedes was laughing about
nothing, the very Nothing that makes us speak.
WORKS CITED
Badiou, Alain and Barbara Cassin. Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: Deux leçons sur
“L’étourdit” de Lacan. Paris: Fayard, 2010.
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957.
26
Letter of November 12, 1922, qtd. in François Roustang, How to Make a Paranoid Laugh or What Is
Psychoanalysis?, trans. Anne C. Vila (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2000), vii.
27
Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 246.
Cassin, Barbara, Editor. Dictionary of Unstranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon.
Translated and edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015
Dolar, Madlen. “Tuché, clinamen, den.” Savoirs et clinique: Jacques Lacan,
matérialiste: Le symptôme dans la psychanalyse, les lettres et la politique 16
(March 2013): 140–151.
“The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik ,
Volume XXXIV, Number 2 (2013): 11–26
Fierens, Christian. Lecture de L’étourdit. Lacan 1972 Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002.
“Television.” In Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.
Edited by Joan Copjec. Translated by Denis Hollier et al. New York:
Norton, 1990, pp. 3–46.
Seminar XX. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and
Knowledge. Translated by Bruce Fink. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.
“L’étourdit.” In Autres Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Roustang, Francois. How to Make a Paranoid Laugh or What is Psychoanalysis?
Translated by Anne C. Vila. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2000.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Seneca: Moral and Political Essays. Edited by John M.
Cooper and J.F. Procopé. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Serres, Michel. La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et
turbulence. Paris: Minuit, 1977.
The Birth of Physics. Edited by David Webb. Translated by Jack Hawkes.
Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
Smith, Wesley D. Editor and Translator. Pseudepigraphic Writing: Letters,
Embassy, Speech from the Altar, Decree. (Studies in Ancient Medicine 2)
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990.
Žižek, Slavoj. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
New York: Verso, 2012.
chapter 4
The surplus jouissance of the joke from Freud to Lacan

Marcel Drach
Lacan resurrects Marx’s notion of surplus jouissance (plus de jouir) as the

relation of the subject to the signifier, to signifying materiality. It marks
the loss and recuperation of jouissance in a return to an originary experi-
ence of lalangue. One can already find in Freud this dimension of the
subject in his trilogy of works dedicated to the language of the uncon-
scious: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life (1901), and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). In the
text on jokes, (Witz), Freud proposes that the joke produces pleasure.
Lacan further develops this notion in Seminar V (Formations of the
Unconscious, November–December, 1957). He refers back to his “The
Instance of the Letter,” focusing on metaphor and metonymy. Lacan’s
introduction to the concept of lalangue in Seminar 20 (Encore, 1972–73)
opens up another approach to the Witz and the jouissance it produces.
In revisiting these three theoretical texts – Freud’s book on jokes and
Lacan’s Seminars of 1957 and 1972 – we will take up the question of the
joke’s jouissance in two theoretical moments: the techniques of the Witz
and the surplus jouissance of the Witz.
The techniques of the Joke (Witz)

In his book, Freud distinguishes two classes of Witz. First, the Klangwitz1
that we can translate following Strachey as the sound joke, and that Freud
also qualifies as a spoonerism or malapropism. Second, the Gedankenwitz2,
which Strachey translates as the conceptual joke, and which Freud also
calls Denkfehler3 or a fault in the train of thought. These two classes put
into play two distinct groups of joke techniques.
1
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1990), 31.
2 3
Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 86. Ibid., 72.
73
74 marcel drach
The sound joke focuses on the similarity of sound (Anklang) of words,
or on linguistic assonance, in order to invent composite words
(Mischwort), or to utilize what is already available in a given language.
Freud’s “famillionaire”4 joke is of the first type, and the Trauring aber wahr
joke5 is of the second type.
In the first type, the joke is a result of homophony between words;
between “familiar” and “millionaire,” the phonemes “fa” and “mili” con-
dense into “famillionaire.” Following Jakobson’s theorization, one may call
this the paradigmatic phase of the perception of sound. The construction
or utilization of sequences (words or phrases) occurs in Jakobson’s second
or syntagmatic phase, where the use of common phonemes fuses into a
surprising formation. This condensation into a syntagm, a chain of distinct
words into one, makes their homophony resonate and brings about
condensation of their signifiers producing multiple meaning effects.
The example Freud gives of the second type, the Trauring aber Wahr
joke, combines two procedures. The joke consists of a phrase pronounced
by a man who has just gotten married. Trauring in German means
wedding ring, and the word includes traurig, which means “sad.” Here,
the Witz does not need substitution for the joke to emerge; it makes use of
a substitution already available in German. “Traurig aber wahr” is a
common expression meaning “sad, but true.” The subtraction of one letter
is enough to remove the word “Trauring” from the context in which one
usually finds it (i.e., marriage) and substitute it with traurig (sad) in the
well-known syntagm (sad but true) to underline the phonic similitude of
the two words and to bring about their semantic fusion, producing the
joke. We note the same technique at work in the joke made after Margaret
Thatcher’s death. One read on the walls of Liverpool’s working-class
district: “The Iron Lady is dead: rust in peace.”
The sound joke (Klangwitz) works by way of the phonic condensation
of words, constructing syntagms out of homophony, to create a new
meaning, and often more than one. There is also a sort of sound joke that
works on the syntagm, not in order to create it, but in order to slide from
one syntagm to another. The most famous of these is the Witz of the
Golden Calf: At a party, Frederick Soulié introduced Heinrich Heine to a
rich, flattering financier, saying: “You see, the 19th century is in the process
of adoring the Golden Calf.” Heine retorted: “Oh no, it is certainly older
still!”. . .
4 5
Ibid., 52. Ibid., 20.
The surplus jouissance of the joke from Freud to Lacan 75
“Golden Calf” belongs to what Saussure calls an associative series
founded on an analogy of signifiers, that is, a class of semantic equiva-
lences. This is the class of divinities and animal idols: the sacred cow, the
royal python, and so on. Heine’s “joke operation” consists in extracting the
word “calf” from the syntagm, “Golden Calf,” where it refers to the famous
idol, and to insert it into a discourse where “calf” is understood in a
biological manner, in terms of an animal’s biological age. By way of the
joke, the calf is attached to another semantic class, not a mythological or
religious one, but a zoological class: heifer, cow, beef, and so on. This
maneuver displaces the signifier “calf” from one semantic universe to
another. The perfect homophony engenders a radical heteronomy. By
virtue of the allusion to age, Heine dislodges the calf from its original
syntagm and makes the rich man pass from divine to bestial.
While the sound joke (Klangwitz) rests upon the phonic paradigm of
homophony, the conceptual joke (Gedankenwitz) rests upon the semantic
paradigm. The “salmon with mayonnaise” joke is the classic example:
Invoking his financial distress, a ruined man borrows money from his
more fortunate friend. A short while later, the rich friend sees the borrower
at a restaurant, sitting at a table in front of plate of a salmon with
mayonnaise sauce. He asks him in a tone of reproach whether it was for
this meal that he had borrowed the money. The borrower saucily replies:
“If I cannot eat salmon with mayonnaise when I am broke or when I have
money – then I will never eat it!” Freud notes that there is no double sense
here. This joke breaks with homophonic play altogether. There is but one
response that avoids the wealthy friend’s reproach and it is the one that
responds obliquely, by side-stepping logical reasoning. There again there is
a mistake but one that follows the law, that is a step aside that at the same
time, remains logical. Freud speaks here of diversion (Ablenkung). We have
looked at the syntagmatic and paradigmatic pathways of the diversions of
sense that characterize the sound joke (Klangwitz). What about the
salmon-mayonnaise retort? Let us transpose this process into logical prop-
ositions that result in the witty repartee:
Proposition 1: The reproach of the rich benefactor can be translated
logically: money and poverty, thus no salmon.
Proposition 2: That skews the first one, reducing it to: money thus no
salmon.
Proposition 3: The basic truth: No money thus no salmon.
Proposition 4: The final trait imposes itself in all its rigor after we take
into account propositions two and three: Whether one has money or
not – no salmon.
76 marcel drach
The process, while logically rigorous is flawed. Poverty is removed from
proposition 1 to form proposition 2 without it. This removal is hidden
behind the syntactic similarity of the two propositions. It suffices then to
state the obvious under the same logical form (proposition 3), to conclude
perfectly in an absurdity. Successive logical slidings proceed toward the
final pleasure of the Witz.
The above example shows how the semantic Witz puts a strictly internal
displacement into play. The signified and its logical relations make the joke
without playing on analogous phonemes (as in the sound joke). Freud
speaks of the “automatism Witz,” when the punch line obeys a logical and
irresistible constraint, even if it is contrary to the interests of its heroes. We
see this, for example, in the joke where the bridegroom whispers the defects
of the young bride just introduced to him into the matchmaker’s ear. He
complains, “She squints, her teeth are ruined (and so on)!” : “Don’t worry,
you can speak louder!” replies the matchmaker, “She is also deaf!”
If the key to the sound joke is homophony, or equivocation, what we
have called, following Jakobson, the sound paradigm, the key to the
conceptual joke is the identity or opposition within the signified, the
logical paradigm.
Condensation: First approach to “The Wit of the Witz”

After having laid out the techniques of the Witz just discussed, Freud
classifies them under the concept of condensation (Verdichtung): “The
multiple use of the same material is, after all, only a special case of
condensation; play upon words is nothing other than a condensation
without substitute formation; condensation remains the wider category.”6
He adds: “all these techniques are dominated by a tendency to compression,
or rather to saving. All seem to be a question of economy. In Hamlet’s
words: “thrift thrift Horatio.”7 Condensation and economic savings are the
two theoretical concepts that allow an initial approach to the cleverness of
the Witz. We shall establish this for the two categories of jokes.
As we have seen, the sound joke condenses in its syntagm the sounds of
homophonic words or phrases: this sonorous compression has an effect of
semantic compression: a reduced quantity of signifiers is allotted a consid-
erable quantity of meaning. Let’s think about our previous examples of the
famillionaire and Trauring aber wahr jokes, which presume a critique of
capitalism and of the fundamental human institution, the family. If saving
6 7
Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 47. Ibid.
is the correlate of condensation, one can see that what is saved is the
signifier. However, upon analyzing the famillionaire joke, Freud shows
that the sound joke’s wit is not in the thought that it garners, but rather in
its rarified signifier. It is enough to proceed by way of what Freud describes
as a reduction of the Witz, that is to say to unfold the meaning with many
more signifiers, to suppress the effect of hilarity. The cleverness of the Witz
is in the inverse ratio to the prompting of signifiers.
From then on, the sound joke is witty not only because the signifiers are
rare, but because the condensation of sound engenders meaning. The
sonorous materiality of the signifiers is a cause of meaning and it is in this
manner that meaning captures the body. The sound joke’s wit would thus
belong to music, which according to Levi-Strauss, reconciles physical
sensitivity and intelligibility.
At first, in 1957, Lacan sees the effect of metaphor in the Witz, substi-
tuting one signifier for another, or the co-presence of two signifiers in the
metonymic chain. He calls “breaching” the actions upon the meaning of
the internal operations of the signifier. From 1972 on, Lacan determines
that in the “famillionaire” joke what is central is no longer the operation of
substitution from “familiar” but the meaning effect that results from the
phonic condensation of “millionaire” and “familiar.” This is an example of
the properly poetic meaning effect of lalangue, which Lacan uses as a way
to return to Freud’s condensation, illuminated here by the poetic function
Jakobson proposed in 1958.
The semantic Witz also employs condensation and saving. When it
proceeds by paradigmatic displacement, as in the “salmon mayonnaise”
joke, the semantic joke brings to bear on the small group of the punch
line’s signifiers the conclusion of a chain of logical or seemingly logical
slidings; these slidings distort the statement and engender a subversive
formulation. The sentence “You can speak louder, she is also deaf!” is the
rigorous consequence drawn by the marriage broker from the “offer” that
he made to the young man. But the contradiction it introduces with the
interests of the marriage broker, the parents, and the institution of
marriage, overdetermines this laconic phrase that uses an abundance of
signifiers in its unfolding of meaning. Between the signifiers of the punch
line – this term testifies to the fragmentary nature of the signifiers – and
the meaning that they support, the coalescence of sound and sense, specific
to the sound joke, does not occur. There is however, an action of the
signifier, since it is enough to pronounce some phonemes so that the “extra
sense” of the Witz would emerge, along with the surplus jouissance that is
experienced.
78 marcel drach
The surplus jouissance of the Witz

In chapters 3 and 4 of his book, Freud says that the pleasure of the Witz
(he speaks of a feeling of well-being, Wohlgefallen) has two sources: the
pleasure of an originary play on the sounds of words, and the satisfaction
of desire (Freud speaks of tendency, Tendenz) procured by the Witz. His
thesis is that the Witz utilizes the pleasure of playing to erode the
inhibition that blocks desire. The first type of pleasure, much weaker
than the second, sets up and precedes the second. Freud distinguishes
four tendencies served by the Witz: First, the obscene or bawdy joke at
the service of sexual desire. Freud notes here that while the cultural
super-ego is strong, the formal constraint, that is to say the condensation
imposed on the Witz, is stronger. The second type of Witz is the hostile,
aggressive one, equally prohibited by culture. The third is also hostile,
but aims at cultural institutions (marriage, family, money, etc.); Freud
calls this one the cynical Witz. And the fourth is the skeptical Witz, in
the service of philosophical pessimism. The skeptical Witz takes, in
particular, the duplicity of language as its target. For example, in the
Witz that points out the flaw of meaning that is at play in every Witz,
like in the well-known joke of “Where are you going?” “I am going to
Crakow”. . .
Freud inscribes the pleasure process of the Witz in its psychic
genealogy. Let’s recall that in 1905 Freud applies his economic theory
of pleasure to the Witz. Psychic inhibition requires an expenditure of
energy (Aufwand). The pleasure of the Witz stems from a double
economy of this expenditure. One part of this economy comes from
the expense incurred in the maintenance of the linguistic constraint that
is saved by the pure play with the sounds of language. The other saving
results from the expenditure that inhibits the drive, a tendency that is
lifted by the tendentious Witz. The psychic genealogy of the Witz
involves three stages: The first is that of the originary play (Spiel) on
sounds and on sound effects. The pleasure found here is found again in
the two ulterior stages. The pleasure is engendered by the lifting of the
linguistic codes constraint. In Child Language, Aphasia and the
Phonological Universals, Jakobson analyses the pre-linguistic creativity of
the child and underlines a duality in the usage of linguistic sounds. This
usage could be considered poetic. It uses the sounds belonging to
language, as well those foreign to it, such as onomatopoeia, synesthesia,
and homophony. In The Sound Shape of Language (1979), Jakobson calls
this, “sense-determinative function of the distinctive features.”8 The
second usage is linguistic: it involves recourse to the distinctive and the
arbitrary nature of sounds in order to produce verbal signs. Jakobson calls
it “sense-discriminative function of the distinctive features.”
Jakobson agrees with Freud concerning the resistance to the linguistic
constraint, noting children’s tenacious displeasure in adopting a certain
amount of linguistic patrimony, and in remarking that the distinction of
sounds (and thus the consent to their linguistic function) is experienced as
a subjective value (due to parental agreement). Jakobson goes beyond
Freud, however, on the question of the poetic. The poetic function in
Lacan’s thought will become a crucial dimension of psychoanalysis.
Second stage: In the education of the child, play comes to an end, says
Freud, due to the reinforcement of rationality objecting to savage linguistic
Spiel (play). However, the Witz’s maneuver consists in disarming the
rational critique insofar as the play on sound still has a meaning (Freud).
This is the strategy of the joke (Scherz): to make playing pass underneath
the cover of a modicum of rational sense.
Third stage: in the tendentious Witz, the Witz’s savoir-faire with the
sounds of lalangue (first used for playing and joking) is enlisted in the
service of the tendencies of the drives. This savoir-faire is mobilized in a
two-stroke mechanism that is the Witz’s pleasure process. Freud considers
the pleasure of the Witz necessary, but not sufficient: necessary because the
Witz disappears when the word-play is made explicit, insufficient, because
the pleasure procured by the play is too weak to lift the inhibition entirely.
Thus the word-play must function as an initiator or trigger (Auslösung).
This context sheds light on the hostile Witz in the following ways: The
tendentious joke is oriented toward insult. Cultural censorship opposes the
insult as displeasure rather than pleasure. This would make the insult
difficult, if not impossible. In the case of the joke, however, Freud says
that the materiality of language serves the insult and makes a good Witz
possible. We are thus able to experience the pleasure of word-play (Spiel),
an uncensored pleasure. The pleasure promised by the word-play cannot
be experienced without the insult. Thanks to it, the witticism becomes
possible (“es wird geschimpft, weil damit der Witz ermöglicht ist”).9 In other
8
Roman Jakobson and Linda Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1979).
9
Sigmund Freud, Der Lustmechanismus und Die Psychogenese Des Witzes. Gesammelte Werke VI (1905),
153.
80 marcel drach
words, the aim of the pure pleasure of the word-play provides “sufficient
strength to overcome the inhibition which would otherwise be stronger
than it.”10
The pleasure (Wohlgefallen) yielded by the insulting Witz is incompar-
ably greater than the one the word-play (Spiel) procured. This attests to the
fact that the tendency initially repressed has succeeded in imposing itself
without being cut away.
In the tendentious Witz, Freud calls what presides over the pleasure
process, the preliminary pleasure principle Vorlustprinzip, an inhibition-
eroding mechanism. It is in this way that the tendentious Witz remains
faithful to the original word-play. We have noted three successive battles
set forth by the Witz : against the linguistic constraint, against the critical
judgment of reason, and against the inhibition of the drive.
Following Lacan’s developments beginning in 1972, one is able to go
beyond this ingenious thesis and invert Freud’s proposition that the insult
occurs so that the Witz can happen, to state that the Witz occurs so that
the insult can happen, because what is lacking in Freud’s thesis is what
Jakobson calls the sense-determining function of sound, discussed above.
This function is at work in the initial experience of lalangue. Lacan
introduces this concept in his seminar Encore. Famillionaire, a hostile
Witz, realizes the insult by means of a sonorous aggregation resulting from
homophony. An impression of nonsense emerges from the fact that the
sound abruptly changes its status: it is no longer meaning discriminative, it
has become meaning determinative. There is a “breaching,” but it is not
the one Lacan spoke of in 1957. At that time, Lacan used it to refer to the
Witz and to all of the possible combinations of the code (reduced to
metaphor and metonymy) that are supposed to take place in the Other.
Again there is a “breaching” in the Jakobsonian sense, as described in his
1971 article on the anagrams of Saussure: meaning is caused by the
sonorous materiality of the signifiers. From then on, the desire, or the
“push to the Witz,” finds its satisfaction in this sonorous materiality,
which, by virtue of its condensed structure, incorporates meaning and
captures it in the body.
At the place of the Freudian process of the Vorlustprinzip, it is necessary
to substitute the Witz’s process of surplus jouissance: The loss of jouissance
results from renouncing the realization of desire, and the Witz makes room
for the inhibition. The Witz is produced by the technique of condensation,
with surplus jouissance recuperated in its materiality. Once again we
10
Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 135.
encounter corruption, but now it is transformed: the laughter of the
listener is an implicit agreement from the Other, which authenticates the
Witz, allowing the jokester to enjoy.
Conclusion: The wit of the Witz

We said that condensation and saving are two concepts that sketch a first
approach to the wit of the Witz, proper to lalangue. The other approach
refers to the third battle of the Witz: its fight against inhibition, thanks to
which it can serve the drive. Taken together, these two approaches are
the effect, as we have said, of a different regime in the functioning of the
signifier. Such a change undoes the phallic jouissance generated by the
signifiers that alienate the subject. The wit of the Witz is a jouissance
deriving from a loss, which is then recovered in the materiality of a
signifying formation. In 1957, Lacan talks of sovereignty, referring to
Georges Bataille. In Lacan’s (1975) later formulation, the wit of the Witz
becomes lalangue civilizing the body’s jouissance.
WORKS CITED
Freud, Sigmund. Der Lustmechanismus und Die Psychogenese Des Witzes.
Gesammelte Werke VI. 1905. 131–154.
Der Witz und die Arten des Komischen. Gesammelte Werke VI. 1905. 206–269.
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. New
Jakobson, Roman. Child Language, Aphasia and the Phonological Universals. The
Hague: Mouton, 1968.
Jakobson, Roman and Linda Waugh. The Sound Shape of Language.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
chapter 5
Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on

the economy of jokes1
Jean-Michel Rabaté
The anthropology of laughter has a long history into which Freud intervened
boldly and decisively when he provided his far ranging synthesis with his
book on Jokes.2 This history could go from the invention of laughter in
Paleolithic Europe, some 80,000 years ago, if we are to trust Jean-Jacques
Annaud’s 1981 filmic adaptation of a novel entitled The War of Fire, to the
recent drama in Paris, when a group of cartoonists and editors were shot to
death for having made fun of the Muslim prophet. Their killers, French-born
suburban jihadists, believed that only blood could wash away the religious
slurs they saw in satire. Their act testified to their refusal of a culture stressing
the corrective power of laughter. For them, an image deemed sacred is
literally untouchable, and hence must be defended by all means. They killed
beloved artists whose credo was that in a liberal democracy one has the right
to make fun of all sacred icons, wherever they come from. The artists’ motto
was that facing humor, there is no need to spare anything.
In Annaud’s film Quest for Fire, the two heroes, Gaw and Amoukar, are
startled when they discover the social practice of laughter in the more
advanced tribe of the Ivakas. A little later, Amoukar drops a small rock on
sleeping Gaw’s head, who looks up in surprise – but for once, instead of
fighting, they all burst out laughing, including Gaw himself. Here, clearly,
the ability to laugh implies a progression in culture or a movement away
from barbarism. Dropping his own brick on the loaded table, Freud wanted
to provide a distinctive concept that would unite all these different cultural
manifestations, and needed for this aim a principle founded upon the
economy of libido, an economic principle that he had recently systematized
about dreams and parapraxes.
1
Section II of this essay takes up and develops a passage of the conclusion of my book, Crimes of the
Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 221–225.
2
Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin,
2002), 49.
82
Lacan, Freud, and Marx on the economy of jokes 83
I
Freud’s joke book offers one of the most systematic developments of the
economic point of view applied to unconscious formations. Freud reiter-
ates that the pleasure created by a joke derives from a sense that an
economy has been gained. His main “economic” thesis is that a “gain in
pleasure corresponds to the saving in psychical expenditure.”3 The archetypal
joke in Freud’s corpus is Heinrich Heine’s quip that mentions one of the
Rothschilds having treated him very “famillionairely,” a pun analyzed at
length.4 The principle of a witty condensation of words (“familiarly” and
“millionaire”) generates the principle of “economizing” (sparen). If the
guiding principle is that of “economizing” or “saving” (Ersparung),
the brunt of the effort of saving is borne by inhibition or repression.
Why, can we ask, is the mere fact of saving energy such a boon that it
triggers laughter? As Freud admits, the concept is “still very unclear.”5 If we
can admit that the idea of “saving” brings some relief to the bedraggled and
overburdened psychic apparatus, the jump to an outburst of laughter is
harder to accept. The “short-circuit” is mostly verbal and gathers different
mental associations. Can one query Freud’s economic optimism?
Freud asserts that two principles are at work simultaneously in the joke-
work: a joke will economize on psychical expenditure while it also
overcomes or bypasses the critical sense deriving from repression or inhib-
ition. The first mechanism describes a condensation, which is often purely
verbal, whereas the other achieves something like a displacement, especially
when the joke is sexual in nature and aims at touching or seducing someone.
“We need only repeat that this pleasure comes from an economizing
(Ersparung an psychischem Aufwand) in psychical expenditure and a relief
(Erleichterung vom Zwange der Kritik) from the compulsion of criticism.”6
The next paragraphs discuss the function of playing well manifested by
children. In this analysis, the key term remains within the economic domain,
but means “freedom” and “fun”7 presented as a release (Auslösung) or a
“removing” process (Aufhebung) both working together.8 By lifting up or
cancelling internal inhibition, the joke-work allows new sources of pleasure to
flow. Such a freely flowing activity functions as a unity, which makes it
impossible to distinguish what comes from the form and what comes from
3 4 5
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 114. See ibid., 9–13. Ibid., 113.
6
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 122; Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine
Beziehung zum Unbewussten, in Psychologische Schriften. Studienausgabe (Band IV) (Frankfurt:
Fischer, 1970), 120.
7 8
Spiel and Scherz. Freud, Der Witz, 121. Ibid., 127.
84 jean-michel rabaté
the content of the joke. The dialectical process of freeing releases (entbinden)
pleasurable affects that were hitherto bound and constrained. This releasing
power finds a theoretical corroboration in Fechner’s definition of a pleasure
that is multiplied. It is thus not divided, condensed, economized, or, even less,
“saved.” Freud quotes Gustav Theodor Fechner’s Preschool of Aesthetics, a
book which states that “. . . there emerges a greater, often much greater, pleasure
than the pleasure-value of the individual determinants by themselves, greater than
could be explained as the sum of single effects.”9 The terms deployed by Fechner,
Lustbedingungen (determinants of pleasure), Lustresultat (result of pleasure),
Lustwerte (pleasure values), and finally Lustergebnis (outcome of pleasure), all
imply a certain quantification of the libidinal energy steadily moving toward a
plus or as surplus. Freud quotes a passage in bold on page 51 of this revolution-
ary treatise in experimental psychology, immediately generalizing the thesis,
adding that it would be all the more true of artistic production in general.10 All
this betrays his uneasiness with the previously stated principle of the economy
of joke that had been reduced to a simple “thrift” or “sparing.” A stronger but
opposite principle consists in lifting the ban of inhibition, repression, and
criticism, which then triggers a multiplying factor. Here we approach the
concept of the overdetermination of dream images, which means in fact a
multiplicity of determinations of those images. The examples appended to
this new principle turn around absurd jokes. Here is one, since it echoes with
many others: “As he is being served fish at dinner, a man reaches with both
hands into the mayonnaise and rubs it into his hair. His neighbor looks at him
in astonishment, so he seems to notice his mistake and apologizes: ‘Excuse
me, I thought it was spinach.’”11 Such a teaser confirms the idea of extrava-
gance and exuberance: Whenever the free enjoyment of nonsense is permit-
ted, one cannot distinguish between mayonnaise and spinach any longer.
Thus there might be another economy implied by the logic of the Witz,
and it would be revealed by Freud progressively, by the sequence of quotes
from Hamlet that dot The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious as so
many submerged markers. Freud finds first a formal principle, whose name
is just: “brevity.” The term is used by Polonius, who is ironically disclosing
the notion in a long-winded speech:
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.12
9 10 11
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 129. Ibid., 129–130. Ibid., 134.
12
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 5.
The second irony is that Polonius wants simply to disclose his conclusion:
“Your son is mad,” as if this would explain everything. Madness would be
the only content of a statement marked by “brevity.” Polonius, unhappily,
is not mad, and until he is dispatched almost absent-mindedly by Hamlet,
his utterances are never brief but prolix, verbose, and wordy. This one of
the reasons why the audience is not too shocked by his death.
Soon after, Freud notes that if brevity is necessary, it is not sufficient –
laconism as such is not witty. One needs to add to the formal principle a
psychic rationale. This time, the psychic logic will be motivated by the
principle of “thrift.” Telling Horatio “Thrift, thrift,” Hamlet made fun of
his mother’s wish to use the remainder of the dishes prepared for his
father’s funeral in a marriage banquet:
The funeral bakes meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.13
Of course, once more, we need to take the principle with a pinch of salt –
Hamlet does not really believe that the court of Denmark is so cash-
strapped that they were obliged to hurry from one ceremonial feast to
the other. His joke derives from his sense of scandal, of mystery and deep
sin – serving funeral meats for a wedding is a culinary incest.
However, the two principles of brevity and thrift, both ushered in tongue-
in-cheek, are not sufficient yet. Freud is aware that more levels of analysis are
needed, which is why he follows a warning uttered “scornfully,” as Freud
himself notes, by Hamlet, who says that: “There are more things in heaven
and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”14 This third principle is
what can call a principle of excess, since it often overrides the first two. For the
clownish wit, for the entertaining courtier, for the wily homme d’esprit, less is
not more. The principle of excess is often exemplified in Freud’s book by
jokes staging the issue of poor people borrowing from the rich, or quite simply
the power of money. Such is the prerogative of money that it can top a bad
joke with a good witticism, as appears in the example borrowed by Freud from
the memoirs by Jakob von Falke, in a passage reminiscing on a visit to Ireland.
Visitors are shown waxworks representing famous figures, we may surmise
with poor accuracy. Upon being told that the scene represents the Duke of
Wellington and the famous horse that he rode at the battle of Waterloo, a
young lady who means to be spiritual asks: ”Which is the Duke of Wellington
and which is the horse?” The guide cuts her weak joke by replying: “Just as
you like, my pretty child. You pay your money and you have your choice.”15
13 14 15
Ibid., 33. Ibid., 60. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 59.
The laughter following this sally may have been half-hearted, for one can hear
a rebuke here, and a reminder of class difference.
This ushers in a fourth principle that Freud deduces not from Hamlet
this time but from Love’s Labors Lost:
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it. . .16
Let us highlight the term of prosperity, which means both success and
economic well-being. The principle of thrift has been replaced not by its
opposite, but by a meaning that goes in another direction, that of “thriving.”
When does a joke thrive? As soon as it is heard, that is, understood, by
another. The jest or joke is not bounded by its production in the savings
bank of the Unconscious. Freud’s Unconscious may be a Kasse, or even a
Schmuckkästchen as with Dora, but it is not a Sparkasse. For indeed, if we
spare most of our memories and repressed images in the Unconscious,
nobody can tell whether there will be any interest added or even whether
they can be withdrawn at will. The Unconscious resists the rationalist logic
of investments for it often behaves in a most absurd manner.
Does its rationality lie in the principle of economy? Early enough, Freud
voiced some doubts when he stated that the unconscious economizes the
way a housewife pays much more in transportation in order to go to a
distant market just because vegetables are cheaper there.17 Doubts tend to
multiply then: “Is not the economy (Ersparnis) in words expressed more
than cancelled (aufgehoben) by the expense of intellectual effort? And who
is being so thrifty? Who benefits from it?”18 Then Freud examines more
examples running all the gamut from simple word puns (calembours) to
archaic pleasure found in nonsense. Its best representation is the Irish bull.
The same Jakob von Falke taught Freud about the absurdist logic of
the Irish bull, which is exemplified by another Wellington story. Visitors
being told about the battle of Waterloo, one asked: “Is that the place
where the Duke of Wellington spoke those words?” The immortal reply
was: “Yes, this is the place, but he never spoke the words.”19 The shift in
logic opens up several spaces side by side: Wellington was indeed at the
battle, but he did not speak; hence, he must have spoken the words
elsewhere; or the words were invented afterwards; perhaps the whole
battle was invented as well . . . Hesitating between Napoléon and
16 17 18
Ibid., 136. Ibid., 34. Ibid.
19
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 80 in a note.
Wellington, we reach here the deep skepticism that derives from such an
overturning of conventional logic.
The logic of nonsense presents numerous parallels with dreams, and
Freud continues his analysis of jokes by comparing them with dreams. It is
much later that he returns to the economic principle that he left aside for a
while. This time he wants to face his own doubts and tackle the conceptual
tension between thrift and expenditure. Freud reiterates that the “savings
made by using the same words” count for nothing “against the enormous
expenditure involved in the act of thinking.”20 He then develops a com-
plex economic parable:
We may do well to allow ourselves to compare the economy (Ökonomie) of the
psyche with a business concern. As long as the business turnover is very small,
the main thing of course is that on the whole not much is spent and that the
running costs are kept extremely low. The frugality (Sparsamkeit) applies to
the absolute height of expenditure. Later, when the business has expanded, the
importance of running costs lessens; it no longer matters how high the amount
of expenditure becomes as long as the turnover and returns can be sufficiently
increased. Restraint in expenditure for running the business would be petty,
indeed positively unprofitable. However, it would be wrong to assume that
given the absolute amount of expenditure there would be no more room for
the tendency towards economy (Spartendenz). The boss’s thrifty-mindedness
will now turn to parsimony (Sparsamkeit) in single items, and feel satisfied if
the same activity can now be managed at a lower cost when its previous costs
were higher, however small the economy (Ersparnis) may appear in comparison
with the total expenditure. In a quite analogous way, economy (Ersparung) in
details remains a source of pleasure in the complicated business of our psyche,
too, as everyday occurrences can show us.21
Freud is giving us a strange lesson in practical economy; he instructs about
business management by detailing how one should shift from a small
business for which thrift is crucial to a bigger company in which a rapid
turnover is a sign of success. The first example he gives then can strike one as
curious: He assumes that there is a pleasure in switching an electric button if
one has been used to lighting a gas lamp. Is that true? Nevertheless, the gain
in the joke’s saving remains a small saving or a small gain. We remain within
a minimal “economy” that seems dwarfed by the huge psychic energy
deployed and channeled by the Unconscious. As the Interpretation of Dreams
stated in a famous image, we have to see the Unconscious as a capitalist, but
even a big capitalist likes small savings. This is when Freud compares the
motive of the wish underpinning a dream with capital.
20 21
Ibid., 150. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 150; Der Witz, 147.
The position may be explained by an analogy. A day-time thought may well
play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as
people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing
without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the
capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and
indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from
the unconscious.22
What happens if this capitalist decides to laugh? Here was exactly
Lacan’s point of departure. I will follow his analysis, which includes a
reading of Marx, before returning to Freud’s economics of the joke.
II
Lacan was reading Marx in his twenties when he was a medical student.
Already alerted to psychoanalytic issues, he was reading Marx with a
psychoanalytic ear, his floating attention bolstered by the fact that he
was reading Capital in the Parisian metro. What struck him then was a
specific type of laughter. In the winter of 1968, Lacan reminisced about his
discovery of laughter in Marx’s text. Reading chapter one of book three of
Capital, in which Marx develops an account of the production of surplus-
value, Lacan chanced upon a passage describing the capitalist’s understand-
ing of the mechanism of surplus-value. When the capitalist suddenly
understands the process, he laughs. Such a detail struck Lacan: “This
feature may seem superfluous, yet this is the point that had struck me at
the time of these useful readings. It seemed to me at the time that this
laughter derives from what Marx is unveiling, that is the essence of surplus-
value.”23 Why should the analysis of surplus-value generate laughter? To
understand this point, we need to know the passage in which Marx
introduces the theory of surplus-value:
The capitalist paid to the labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer
gave him back an exact equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him
to the cotton: he gave him value for value. Our friend, up to this time so
purse-proud, suddenly assumes the modest demeanor of his own workman,
and exclaims: ‘Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labor
of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labor,
22
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965),
599–600.
23
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XVI. D’un Autre à l’autre, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil,
2006), 64–65.
too, create value?” His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles.
Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien.24
Here is the point at which Lacan pauses. It might seem that Marx is
presenting a variation on the story of three prisoners whose rapid calculation
of comparative hesitations and exchanges of glances make them realize that
they all carry white discs on their backs.25 Thanks to Marx, we can add a new
twist to Lacan’s famous sophism: looking at each other for a while, the three
prisoners burst out laughing at the same time, and then leave the jail
together. Here, similarly, we have the capitalist, the overlooker and the
manager who are all on the winning side. Two are happy to smile discreetly
about the situation, while one laughs out loudly, unrestrainedly – he is, of
course, our capitalist. Here is what happens to the laughing capitalist:
Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien. Though he
chanted to us the whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says,
he would not give a brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like
subterfuges and juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who
are paid for it. (. . .) The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily
sustenance of labor-power costs only half a day’s labor, while on the other
hand the very same labor-power can work during a whole day, that conse-
quently the value which its use during one day creates, is double what he
pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck
for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller.
Our capitalist foresaw this state of things, and that was the cause of his
laughter. (. . .) The trick has at last succeeded; money has been converted
into capital.26
The capitalist’s laughter accompanies the disclosure of a fundamental
principle: the value that labor-power possesses on its own and the value that
it creates differ in nature and in quantity. This transformation is a “metamor-
phosis,” in which one has the impression that something is created out of
nothing, but as Lucretius exposed, “nihil posse creari de nihilo,” and Marx adds
that the creation of plus value is a transformation of energy.27 The metamor-
phosis can then be measured: “The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact
expression for the degree of exploitation of labour by capital, or of the labourer
by the capitalist.”28 Hence, when the capitalist laughed, it was because he was
24
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moor and Edward Aveling (New
York: Modern Library, 1906.), 215. For the German text, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das
Kapital, Werke, Band 23 (Berlin: Dietz, 1970), 207.
25
See Jacques Lacan, “Logical time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce
Fink (New York: Norton, 2006,), 161–175.
26 27 28
Marx, Capital, 215–217. Ibid., 239 in a note. Ibid., 241.
both exposing his trick and enacting it. This he does too obviously, hence in
the end nobody understands his game. Here is the root of capitalism: the
unholy conversion of money into capital, of work into surplus-value. Its
mechanism triggers laughter because it is both simple and complex.
Such laughter has literary echoes and philosophical predecessors; it covers
up the silent and monstrous work of metamorphosis. There is something
satanic in the process, and in another section Marx quotes Goethe’s Faust. As
Lacan understood this, the moment of the disclosure of the secret functioned
exactly like a Freudian Witz. The truth has been expressed in an apparent joke
that was in fact exhibiting a secret. Marx would agree with Freud that the
paradigm of all jokes is Heine’s Witz about Hirsch-Hyacinth proudly stating
that Baron Rothschild has treated him “famillionairely.”29 As we have seen,
Freud saw there the principle of verbal economy at work, an economy
bringing out something hidden. Let us note that “economy” means both
the general theory of human exchanges, this “economic point of view” that
Freud was struggling to adopt at the time, and the more restricted sense of
“saving” or “not spending.” We will have to return to this amphibology in
Marx’s texts themselves. As Freud explains, by collapsing “familiarly” and
“millionaire,” Heine’s Witz, a precursor of Lewis Carrol’s or Joyce’s
portmanteau-words, obeys the law of condensation, which is one of the
mechanisms of the dream, hence of the unconscious. Much in the same
way, the laugher of the capitalist corresponds to a sleight-of-hand exposing the
mechanism of surplus-value, just as the laughter of the joke is triggered by a
short-circuit. Economy and spending clash with each other, which triggers
a burst of hilarity. We always laugh more, or laugh at excess. . .
Why does the capitalist laugh at this point? He has just understood that
he is bound to make huge profits without having to work, and this just by
milking the unfair system of production based on surplus-value. In the case
of Witze, why does the joker laugh, thus making the others laugh? Because
the seasoned wit attracts the group’s sympathy without having to do
anything, just by letting the potentialities of language work and exploiting
in an instant of verbal triumph a mechanism that is available to all, in their
dreams at least. Hence, we find a confirmation that the capitalistic Uncon-
scious functions like the linguistic Unconscious, which confirms Lacan’s
most basic motto: the Unconscious is structured like a language.
However, if we can grasp why the capitalist laughs at the simplicity of the
deception he profits from, it may appear debatable that we, too, will laugh at
the joke of capitalism, since it is more likely that we will be swindled by it, and
29
none too “famillionarely.” Lacan’s attention to a moment of laughter in his
reading of Marx is typical of his attitude facing Marxism, a philosophy into
which he is trying to reintroduce a sense of laughter that had been lost by the
official communists. This is what happened with the slogans painted in red
letters on the walls of Paris in May 1968, some of which quoted Lacan. They
disclosed Truth ironically: “It is forbidden to forbid,” “Be realistic: take your
desires for realities.” After the interruption of May 68, Lacan started looking in
the direction of Althusser’s reading of Marx in Reading Capital (Lire le
Capital). Lacan was thinking more of “Rire Le Capital”: How to laugh with
Capital. The irony that Lacan exploited for the generation of 68 was that
Capitalists appeared to be laughing much more than the rebellious students,
all too serious in their post-Surrealist jokes. If the Master laughs, can the slave
laugh as well? Structurally, laughter is produced by a farcical libidinal econ-
omy defined by the combined teachings of Freud and Marx; the point,
however, is that one is never sure who will laugh the last.
It follows that one can read Marx with the understanding that he is a funny
writer, as one can see in the German Ideology. Walter Benjamin noted with his
usual clairvoyance that Marx attacked another Left-Hegelian, Karl Grün,
because in his critique of utopian socialism, he had sorely missed the function
of humor in Fourier’s works.30 Indeed, Marx begins by wittily debunking
Grün’s vision of man, too close to Hegel’s: “Anyway, what sort of man is this,
‘man’ who is not seen in his real historical activity and existence, but can be
deduced from the lobe of his own ear, or from some other feature which
distinguishes him from the animals? Such a man ‘is contained’ in himself, like
his own pimple.”31 Then he points out that Fourier’s utopian critique of love
and relationships sticks closer to authentic intuition and the issues of produc-
tion. He highlights Grün’s ponderous pedantry:
Herr Grün finds it an easy matter to criticise Fourier’s treatment of love; he
measures Fourier’s criticism of existing amorous relationships against the
fantasies by which Fourier tried to get a mental image of free love. Herr
Grün, the true German philistine, takes these fantasies seriously. Indeed,
they are the only thing which he does take seriously. It is hard to see why, if
he wanted to deal with this side of the system at all, Grün did not also
enlarge upon Fourier’s remarks concerning education; they are by far the
best of their kind and contain some masterly observations. Herr Grün,
30
See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA:, Harvard University Press, 1999), 5, 17 and 626, where Marx’s full text is
quoted.
31
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), 512.
typical Young-German man of letters that he is, betrays, when he treats of
love, how little he has learned from Fourier’s critique. In his opinion, it is
of no consequence whether one proceeds from the abolition of marriage or
from the abolition of private property; the one must necessarily follow upon
the other. But to wish to proceed from any dissolution of marriage other
than that which now exists in practice in bourgeois society, is to cherish a
purely literary illusion. Fourier, as Grün might have discovered in his
works, always proceeds from the transformation of production.32
This praise is rare, coming from Marx and Engels discussing French
utopian socialists. Marx and Engels perceive here the crucial link between
utopianism and the concrete transformation of social links. This extends to
the famous descriptions of food in Fourier’s ideal society, the phalansteres.
Here, Marx and Engels again approve: “With a naive sense of humor
Fourier opposes a Gargantuan view of man to the unassuming mediocrity
of the men of the Restoration period; but Herr Grün only sees in this a
chance of moralising in his philistine way upon the most innocent side of
Fourier’s fancy, which he abstracts from the rest.”33
As readers of the German Ideology know, its most entertaining pages are to
be found in the debunking review of Max Stirner’s notorious The Ego and Its
Own. Not only is he called Sancho or Saint Max most of the time, not only
do Marx and Engels pretend that Stirner is always talking to his disciple
“Szeliga,” the pen-name of Franz Zychlinski, another Left-Hegelian, but
Stirner is regularly taken to task for his sloppy use of language and slippery
idioms. Whereas Max Stirner was trying to show that Hegel’s idealism had
transformed the world into a ghostly world, playing on the double meaning
of Geist (Spirit and Ghost), Marx and Engels turn the tables against Stirner
and argue that he has become obsessed with ghosts-seeing himself. A whole
section of the German Ideology that was translated as “Whimsy” begins like
this: “‘Man, there are specters in your head!. . . You have a fixed idea!’
Thunders Saint Max at his slave Szeliga. ‘Don’t think I am joking,’ he
threatens him. Don’t dare to think that the solemn ‘Max Stirner’ is capable
of joking. The man of god is again in need of his faithful Szeliga in order to
pass from the object to the subject, from the apparition to the whimsy.”34
The term of “whimsy” (Sparren) is typical of Stirner’s innovative use of
language; here, he plays with the German idiom “Du has einen Sparren zu
viel,” meaning literally “You have one rafter too many,” or indeed: “You have
a screw loose.” When David Leopold retranslated Stirner’s book in 1995, he
used the term of “Wheels in the head” to preserve the original metaphor;
32 33 34
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 512. Ibid., 514–515. Ibid., 160.
Sparren means “rafter” and the image is that of a rickety building with loose
rafters. The expression, for Stirner, is synonymous with a “fixed idea” that is
also a delusion; he uses both to pinpoint superstitious belief in sacred spirits.
Stirner imagines the whole world as an insane asylum in which alienated
people keep on believing in absurd Christian delirium.35 His actual examples
are rather strange: he first argues that people discover the “maniacs” who
govern us only in newspaper accounts, and then provides the example of
brother and sister incest as a perfectly natural thing that has been condemned
by society only in reason of such “Sparren”!36 Once more, Stirner’s arguments
are highly idiomatic and based on popular etymologies, as when he attacks
Hegel and Feuerbach for being too “religious,” adding that “religion” means
“being bound” (re-ligare).37
Marx and Engels need only to twist Stirner’s linguistic analyses to show
that when accusing the bourgeois of being mystified by mere phantasies,
spooks, and delusions, Stirner himself is laboring under a delusion:
“‘Whimsy’ (der Sparren) is a ‘fixed idea’, i.e., ‘an idea which has subordin-
ated man to itself’ or – as it is said later in more popular forms – all kinds of
absurdities which people ‘have stuffed into their heads.’ With the utmost ease,
Saint Max arrives at the conclusion that everything that has subordinated
people to itself – for example, the need to produce in order to live, and the
relations dependent on this – is such an ‘absurdity’ or ‘fixed idea’.”38 Marx
and Engels request a more solid social ground accounting for the institution
of the prohibition of incest, which cannot be reduced to a delusion or to a
fixed idea. What is striking, however, is that their ferocious critique takes
twice as many pages as Stirner’s slim volume. Their glee in this debunking is
obvious, and one hears their constant laughter of jubilation as they write.
The same spirit of freewheeling parody was dominant in Karl Marx’s
first novel (the second novel, entitled Das Kapital, like the first in fact, was
never completed). Marx’s juvenile novel was called Scorpion and Felix,
A Humoristic Novel. It was a delirious comedy in the manner of Sterne’s
Tristam Shandy or of Hoffmann’s Elixirs of the Devil. Unhappily, Marx
destroyed most of it, leaving only a few chapters. Marx was nineteen and
his witty ebullience and comic spirit were at their highest. The remaining
fragments combine non-sense, “whimsy,” and obscure attacks on friends
with off-hand discussions of philosophers like Kant and Hegel. The loose
plot hangs upon the quest of three friends, Felix, Scorpion and Merten, to
35
Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 43.
36 37 38
Ibid., 45. Ibid., 48. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 161.
find out where they come from. It is likely that Marx himself burned most
of the text, but included some fragments in his Book of Verse.39
The term of “whimsy” would be apposite to characterize those pages; in
the “philological broodings” of chapter 21, Marx discusses the etymology of
one of his characters’ name, “Merten.” He explains mock-seriously that
Merten thought that the patronym was derived from “mehr” (more)
because the Mertens had multiplied themselves on the surface of the earth:
“He believes that ‘Merten’ must come from the German ‘Mehren’ [to
multiply], which in its turn comes from ‘Meer’ [sea], because the Merten
marriages multiplied like the sand of the sea, and because in the concept of
a tailor there is concealed the concept of a ‘Mehrer’ [multiplier], since he
makes men out of apes. It is on investigations as thorough and profound as
these that he has founded his hypothesis.” However, the hero refutes this:
“But if ‘Merten’ was derived from ‘Mehrer’, then clearly the word would
have lost, hence not gained, an ‘h’, which has been shown to be in
contradiction with the substance of its formal nature. Thus ‘Merten’
cannot possibly be derived from ‘Mehren’, and its derivation from Meer
is disproved by the fact that Merten families have never fallen into the
water nor have they ever wavered, but they have been a pious family of
tailors, which is in contradiction to the concept of a wild and stormy sea,
from which reasons it becomes manifest that the aforesaid author, despite
his infallibility, was mistaken and that ours is the only true deduction.”
Here is Marx’s typical “whimsy,” and these drunken riffs are those he
chose to keep as a testimony to his stylistic virtuosity and extravaganza.
Marx’s style echoes the Romantic humor of Hoffmann or evokes Jean
Paul’s hilariously pointless shaggy dog stories. Marx’s point of departure
was thus identical with Freud’s passion for Cervantes, Hoffmann, Lichten-
berg, and Jean Paul. Marx’s linguistic frolics reach a culmination in chapter
27: “So define for me which is right and left, and the whole riddle of
creation is solved, Acheronta movebo, I shall deduce for you exactly on
which side your soul will come to stand, from which I shall further infer
which step you are standing on now; for that primal relation would appear
to be measurable with the help of the Lord’s definition of where you stand,
but your present position can be judged by the thickness of your skull.
I am dizzy – if a Mephistopheles appeared I should be Faust, for clearly
each and every one of us is a Faust, as we do not know which is the right
side and which the left; our life is therefore a circus, we run round, try to
39
See Karl Marx, “Supplementary to Dedicated Verses: Some Chapters from Scorpion and Felix:
A Humoristic Novel,” in Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York, International Publishers, 1975), 616–632.
find sides, till we fall down on the sand and the gladiator, Life, slays us.”40
We understand better why the capitalist laughs: he is both Faust, who
rediscovers the principle of life as endless productivity, and the more
sinister Mephistopheles, the spirit of negation who also enjoys a good
laugh. It befell to a French composer to have misunderstood the whole
situation. In Gounod’s Faust, Marguerite states that she has to “laugh
when seeing herself so beautiful in the mirror.”41 The jewel song, a famous
aria, has now become a standing joke in French popular culture because of
Tintin. In the cartoon series by Hergé, when Ah je ris de me voir si belle . . .
is intoned by the formidable singer Bianca Castafiore, Tintin and Captain
Haddock, our modern versions of Marx and Engels, run away and plug
their ears while all the mirrors and glass appliances are shattered.
III
Rather than flee with plugged ears, a sounder tactic, more in the spirit of
Slavoj Žižek, would be to read Marx regressively. Our reading would begin
with the first poems and aborted novels before engaging with his philoso-
phy of history, the latter being, as are told in the essay on Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte, entirely dominated by the concept of parody. Farce and
comedy are the two leading principles of History. We see this principle
as early as the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right from 1843–1844: “History is thorough and goes through
many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a
world-historical form is its comedy.” This idea derives from the fact that
laughter is triggered by an economy of excess that includes time, in the
sense of the time to come, that is the future (capitalism aims at regulating
the future by structuring production in terms of exploitation.)
For Lacan, thus Marx is truly the comedian of the future, and his first
name is more often than not to be spelled Groucho. This is what we see at
the end of the excellent movie Argo, after the complex rescue operation has
been successful and the Teheran hostages freed. The camera pans back to
California and we hear this dialogue:
lester siegel: The saying goes, “What starts in farce ends in tragedy.”
john chambers: No, it’s the other way around.
lester siegel: Who said that exactly?
40
Marx, “Supplementary to Dedicated Verses: Some Chapters from Scorpion and Felix:
A Humoristic Novel,” 629.
41
See Michel Serres, “Les bijoux distraits ou la cantatrice sauve,” Critique 277 (June 1970): 485–497.
john chambers: Marx.
lester siegel: Groucho said that?
Marx allows us to understand how the “object a” – his term for the part
object that is the cause of desire in psychoanalytic theory – remains caught
up in an economy of jouissance that is not circumscribed by the principle of
sparing, hoarding, or saving via condensation. Following Marx, Lacan had
to coin the term of “Mehrlust” (surplus enjoyment) as parallel to Marx’s
Mehrwert (surplus-value). If capitalism is the modern way of dealing with
production, psychoanalysis will thus perversely invert the process of capit-
alism. On the couch, one pays to work on oneself. This will generate a
truth that speaks and eschews the capture by the dialectical twists of
surplus-enjoyment. Inverting the usual links between truth and know-
ledge, Lacan takes knowledge beyond the field in which it continues the
“exploitation of men by men.” However, if communism is, in the old joke,
“just the reverse,” it remains a Marxist point to stress the circular link
between the concept of “revolution” and that of capitalism.42
Lacan elaborated his version of Freudo-Marxism when he launched the
theory of four discourses in the fall of 1969. This theory mediated between
Althusser’s structuralist Marxism and Foucault’s historicism predicated on
a Nietzschean genealogy of value. The four discourses are underpinned by
the “revolutions” of four terms in “quadripods” for which “surplus jouis-
sance” appears as the main engine. “Surplus jouissance” conflates Freud’s
Lust (pleasure) and Marx’s “surplus value” defining capitalism. Such a
concept was to account for the social function of symptoms as well as
libidinal energies invested in social labor. Two couples were opposed, or
better embraced: the Master and the Hysteric who appear complementary
as they replace the old Hegelian category of the master and the slave, and
the Psychoanalyst and the Academic, also opposed and complementary,
replacing the couple of psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Two years later, Lacan added the “discourse of capitalism” and the
“discourse of science” to his four discourses. Science was associated with
the discourse of the Hysteric in so far as the latter aims at procuring new
knowledge. Science is managed by the discourse of the University when
this knowledge is catalogued and transmitted. The discourse of capitalism
falls under the sway of the discourse of the Master; both refer to the
discourse of power, of the institutions, of the State. Here, psychoanalysis
highlights what is commonly forgotten: the function of the subject’s
42
See Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XVI. D’un Autre à l’autre, 333.
enjoyment. “Radiophonie”43 (1970) introduces the “discourse of capital,”
but also examines Marx’s own desire as a thinker:
For Marx, with the plus-value that his chisel detached so as to restitute it to
the discourse of capital, paid the price one has to put to negate, as I do, that
any discourse be pacified by a meta-language (of Hegelian formalism in that
case); this price, he paid it by forcing himself to follow the naive discourse
of ascendant capitalism, and by the hellish life he gave himself thereof. //
This verifies what I say about the plus-de-jouir. The Mehrwert is the
Marxlust, that is Marx’s own plus-de-jouir.44
The “displacement of discourse” that Lacan elaborated brought him far from
the utopian hope that society could be changed after a revolutionary strike or
by a civil war. One had to refuse the temptation of the revolutionary’s
abnegation, the polite disappearance of a militant’s desire for the greater glory
of “a rosier tomorrow.” Subjects should not disappear as such in order to act
out the logic of History. Those who do end up playing the role of “baby-sitters
of History”: “When one will acknowledge the kind of plus-de-jouir that makes
one say “Wow, this is somebody!”, then one will be on the way toward a
dialectical matter maybe more active than the Party fodder (chair à Parti,
punning both on “chair à canon,” cannon fodder, and on “chair à pâté” patty
filling) commonly used as baby-sitter of history (baby-sitter de l’histoire).”45 It
becomes crucial to refuse to turn into “cannon fodder” for the slaughter-
bench of Hegel’s universal history, as well as to be wary of not playing the nice
but deluded role of “baby sitter” of the revolution, while the grown-ups
continue laughing up their sleeves, secure in their magical tricks and accumu-
lating more power and capital. Accumulation is thus linked with absolute
power. Gide shows this very well when he makes of Zeus the main god of the
classical pantheon a modern capitalist, a banker.
In the seminar on the Formations of the Unconscious from November 13,
1957, Lacan went back to Freud’s analysis of the “famillionaire” joke, and
then quoted André Gide who begins his Prometheus Ill-bound by making
the plot revolve around the meeting of Prometheus and Zeus. Zeus is
modernized into a very rich banker, and he is called “the Miglionnaire.”46
Lacan adds that this word should be pronounced as in Italian. Gide, who
had read Freud closely but critically, no doubt alludes here to Freud’s
43
See Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres Écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001),
403–446.
44
Lacan, “Radiophonie,” 434. 45
Lacan, “Radiophonie,” 415.
46
André Gide, Le Prométhée mal enchainé, in Romans et Récits, vol. 1, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris,
Gallimard, Pléiade, 2009), 471.
analysis of Heine’s famous coining. Zeus is making experiments with the
concept of “gratuitous gesture” (acte gratuit, which means both “unmoti-
vated action” and “free gesture”)to prove that no action is “free,” which
means “free of debt.” It would take too long to discuss the contagion of
laughter moving from Gide to Lacan – with a Prometheus finally “untied”
from all the knots of religion and who ends up eating his own eagle . . .
One incident became the keystone of Gide’s life and career, at least as
interpreted by Lacan. In 1918, Madeleine Gide acted decisively when she
burned her only treasure, the huge collection of letters that Gide had
written to her every day for more than thirty years. Stunned by the news,
Gide cried for one week and felt as if he had lost a child. Lacan’s reaction
was ironical, even sarcastic, facing such a “feminine” outburst, while
approving the male gesture of the wronged wife. Madeleine had burned
the letters because she had to do something that would be irrevocable after
her husband’s betrayal in order not to become mad. In Écrits, Lacan
compares Gide’s cry with that of Harpagon, Molière’s famous miser.
Harpagon cries out for the treasure that he thinks has been stolen. He
screams: “My casket!” whereas he should be concerned for his daughter’s
fate.47 Unwittingly, Gide who thought that he was in a tragedy, has
become a character of comedy. Lacan went on without any pity:
The letters in which he placed his soul had . . . no carbon copy (double).
When their fetishistic nature appeared it gave rise to the kind of laughter
that greets subjectivity caught off guard.
It all ends with comedy, but who will put a stop to the laughter?48
Throughout this essay, Lacan, who was aware of Gide’s famous irony,
wondered who was the laughing stock: “Is it the Gide who contents himself
in his final days with writing down on paper silly stories, childhood memor-
ies, and lucky deeds all mixed together, which take on a strange glow in his
Ainsi soit-il?”49 Later on in his essay on Gide, Lacan pinpoints a later text that
critics have bypassed, Ainsi soit-il?, a curious medley of memories and jokes
narrated with obvious glee by Gide who was then eighty-one. One of these
jokes is presented as an “American joke” and in fact is a simple cartoon.
A hen looking like a nurse opens the door of the waiting room in a maternity
hospital; the rooster, waiting anxiously, smoking nervously, wings crossed
behind him like Napoléon, paces up and down the room littered with
47
du Seuil, 1998), 261.
48
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 641.
49
Ibid.
cigarette stubs; the nurse calls out: ”It’s an egg!” Gide explains that this
vignette makes him laugh each time, adding mischievously: “Too bad for
you if you don’t see the connection.”50 His laughter brings us back to an
experience of being born, and even before, to the original egg. The primal
scream of the egg must have sounded like a primal laughter.
IV
Like Marx’s whimsical laughter, Gide’s plus-de-jouir generates a plus-de-rire,
which can degenerate into fou-rire (laughing fit, convulsive laugher). Indeed,
the Mehrlust can be understood as containing “mehr lustig” since “lustig” is
rendered variably as humorous, funny, comical, amusing, jocund, cheerful,
joyful, merry, comical, amusing, causing laughter, joking, jocund, mirthful,
and jolly. There would be a “Mehrlachen” at work in Marx and Freud. Lacan
kept hearing this laughter. We understand therefore why a Witz is both an
expenditure and an economy; as Borges said about the baroque, it is a style
that “spends” by squandering everything it has all at once, but also keeps
reproducing infinitesimal volutes and tropes.
The links between laughter and the fact of being born were made clear by
Sándor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, a close friend and disciple of
Freud. In notes taken in 1913 from Bergson’s Laughter, Ferenczi questioned
the French philosopher’s bias (whereas Freud seemed to enjoy Bergson’s Le
Rire that he quotes several times in his Joke book with approbation). With the
advantage of hindsight, Ferenczi perceived better the distance between psy-
choanalytical and philosophical theories of laughter. For him, psychoanalysis
had to describe laughter in its very production, a production that calls up the
fact of being born. Ferenczi stated right at the beginning: “The pleasure and
unpleasure mechanism of laughter: a repetition of the pleasure and unpleasure
in being born.”51 Ferenczi then questioned Bergson’s reliance on an idealist
idea of life as pure plasticity and untrammelled movement and insisted that
any theory of laughter should take into account the act of laughing: laughing
as a total gesture uniting body and psyche, and not limited to objects at which
we are laughing. Ferenczi’s insight was that laughter would bring us back not
only to our childhood, but before, to an experience of being born. The idea
owes something to Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909), in
50
André Gide, Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits, in Souvenirs et Voyages, ed. Pierre Masson, Daniel
Durosay and Martine Sagaert (Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, 2001), 1016.
51
Sándor Ferenczi, “Laughter,” in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis,
vol. 3, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 177.
which we are told that what distinguished Jesus’s birth was the fact that he
laughed immediately after being born.
Freud’s book on the Witz takes a different tack when quoting a joke
about being born. Freud refers to Sophocles’ famous statement in Oedipus
at Colonus: the best thing for man is never to have been born. Freud’s joke
twists this conceit by reminding us that this happens rarely: “‘Never to have
been born would be the best for mortal kind. But,’ add the philosophers of
the Fliegende Blätter, ‘that scarcely happens to one in 100,000.’” 52 Such jokes
imply a certain exaggeration, which, in the end, works by implicit calcula-
tions whose expectations are suddenly baffled. This recurs in one of the
examples of “Witz” mentioned by Ferenczi, a dialogue between a psycho-
analyst and a patient: “‘Doctor, if you help me, I’ll give you every penny
I possess’ ‘I shall be satisfied with thirty kronen an hour’ the physician replied.
‘But isn’t that rather excessive?’ the patient unexpectedly remarked.”53
The subtraction of one type of excess from another affects the body.
The most common reaction is the phenomenon of laughter, even if one
can laugh or cry as well when overwhelmed by sudden happiness. Ferenczi
sums up Freud’s theory of laugher in economic terms: “In laughing we feel
ourselves into the physical condition of the comic and get rid of the
superfluous provision of affect by means of laughter.”54 For Ferenczi, the
baby’s smile betrays happiness, whether laughter functions as a defense
against excess. “Laughter = defense against excessive pleasure.”55 If post-
natal bliss results in a satisfied smile, laughter, by reenacting the pleasure
and the pain of being born, can play the role of a barrier.
The flash of laughter, in this case, will be triggered by a joke revolving
on time and money – the only two conditions that a psychoanalyst can
manipulate to achieve certain effects, either by cutting the session short
or by increasing the fee, as Lacan was wont to do. It is best represented
by Freud’s analysis of a joke that allows us to understand their twisted
capitalistic economy. “A gentleman goes into a pastry cook’s and orders a
cake; but he soon brings it back and asks for a glass of liqueur instead.
He drinks this up and makes off without paying. The shopkeeper detains
him. ‘What do you want of me?’ – ‘To pay for the liqueur.’ – ‘But I gave
you the cake for it.’ – ‘You didn’t pay for that either.’ But I didn’t eat
it.”56 The German wording of the Witz contains a play on an anaphoric
52
53
Sándor Ferenczi, “The Elasticity of Psycho-analysis Technique,” in Final Contributions to the
Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis, vol. 3, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Basic Books,
1955), 93.
54
Ferenczi, “Laughter,” 180. 55
Ibid., 179.
ja that makes it tastier: “Für den habe ich Ihnen ja die Torte
gegeben.”–“Die haben Sie ja auch nicht bezahlt.”– “Die habe ich ja auch
nicht gegessen.”57 We laugh because of an incomprehensible logical mis-
take, whose point of insertion remains doubtful.
One source of the logical mistake has to do with time. It all hangs from
when we decide to start counting. When does an account begin to accrue?
There is always a “before” any commercial transaction. If the first order is
considered as a free gift, the reasoning makes sense, and the owner has to
accept the consequences. Is it written somewhere that his is a commercial
establishment in which people have to pay for whatever is displayed? Why
assume that he is only selling cakes? Couldn’t he give away a few to treat a
nice customer? Thus having been offered a piece of cake for free, this
customer can change his mind and choose a drink instead . . .
A similar joke is that of the destitute man who borrows a handsome sum
of money from a rich man. The latter is then surprised to see him eating
salmon mayonnaise in a good restaurant. The rich man berates him for
spending the money he has just borrowed in this manner. The poor man
justifies himself in this way: “When I’ve got no money I can’t eat salmon
with mayonnaise; when I’ve got money, I mustn’t eat salmon with
mayonnaise. So tell me, when can I eat salmon with mayonnaise?”58 Freud
analyses this by stating that the key to the joke is not the mere repetition of
“salmon with mayonnaise,” since there are no double meanings involved.
The key, as he argues, lies in a deliberate logical mistake. There is a
“diversion” (Ablenkung)59, a shift or a change in the intellectual focus. In
fact, what we can easily discover is that the key to the joke lies in its
incremental or additive style combined with a grammar of modalities,
which is harder to render in English. In German, we move from “kann
ich nicht essen Lachs mit mayonnaise,” then to “darf ich nicht essen Lachs mit
mayonnaise,” and at last to “wenn soll lich eigentlich essen Lachs mit
mayonnaise.”60 The three modals, können, dürfen, and sollen, traverse
quickly the semantic arc moving from ability to obligation, from potenti-
ality to permission. The grammatical game is enhanced by the spoken style
of the joke. Its direct exchange rules out a termination with the infinitive,
as would be the strict rule – such a formal structure would kill the joke, as
if we had the correct endings: “. . . kann ich nicht Lachs mit mayonnaise
56 57
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 49. Freud, Der Witz, 59.
58 59
Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 40. Freud, Der Witz, 50.
60
Ibid., 50.
essen,” “darf ich nicht Lachs mit mayonnaise essen,” and “wenn soll lich
eigentlich Lachs mit mayonnaise essen.”
The formal principle provides part of the key, as the joke would not work
had it been transposed grammatically, semantically, or conceptually. Let’s
imagine that the same exchange pertains to taking a cruise. After the rich man
gives the money, he sees the poor man lounging on the deck of a transatlantic
liner. The poor man could ask identically: “When should I take a cruise,
then?” As Freud surmises with other examples, this would boil down to mere
cynicism and not be a joke. One needs the constant reiteration of the signifiers
“salmon with mayonnaise” to create a climax triggering laughter. However,
the formal principle is only one half of the joke, as the other half is the play
with a grammar of prohibition and potentialities, which belongs much more
to a logic of libidinal excess as sketched by Fechner in 1897.
Unlike the absurdist joke of the man in a restaurant who rubs his hair
with mayonnaise, this joke provides an appearance of reason. Its presup-
posed point of departure is the need to enjoy life; enjoying life means eating
once in a while a good dish of salmon with mayonnaise. All the rest hangs
from this undoubted premise. In the same way, the joke about the cake and
the glass of liqueur calls up common enough situations in which one
mistakenly assumes that one has been given something for free, only to
discover that one has to pay for it. Both exhibit a faulty reasoning relying on
a slightly but not wildly distorted use of semantics: like the smug capitalist
entrepreneur who laughs when he understands the mechanism of surplus-
value, the wily customer plays on the double meaning of “in exchange for,”
and the salmon eater on the meaning of “when should I. . .?”
The economics of the joke-work do not conform to the idea that our
fate reads like an accounting book in which the positives and the negatives
tally and annul each other. Its lesson leads more to an amused awareness
that if one ends up paying for one’s sins, since no transcendent redeemer
has appeared, any final reckoning will affirm life’s plenty and exuberance.
The hilarity generated by a joke generates in us a sense of freedom from
constraints and inhibition. It is thus comparable to the unexpected
impression of novelty and freedom experienced when falling in love, this
“squandering of our existence that we know in love” so well evoked by
Walter Benjamin. Benjamin evoked Nature’s inexhaustible plenty – for
Nature often overproduces and without any capitalistic motivation – when
documenting how, having taken some hashish in Marseilles, having dined
on a funny “pâté of lion meat” instead of a dish cooked in Lyon, he was
walking in a trance of incomprehensible gaiety and beatific humor, passing
unscathed and laughing through the old city at night, to conclude: “For if,
when we love, our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like golden
coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so that they can thus purchase new
birth, she now throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample
handfuls towards existence.”61 In a similar manner, one can say that the
best Witze fling us into our continuous birth to the world; they throw us
out, all at once, without sparing anything or accounting for anything,
straight into the heart of life’s generosity.
WORKS CITED
Benjamin, Walter. “Hashish in Marseilles.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings.
Part 2, 1931–1934. Vol. 2. Edited by Michael William Jennings. Translated by
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Ferenczi, Sándor. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of
Psychoanalysis. Vol. 3. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Basic
Books, 1955.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey.
New York: Avon Books, 1965.
Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. In Psychologische Schriften.
Studienausgabe (Band IV). Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970.
The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by Joyce Crick. New
York: Penguin, 2003.
Gide, André. Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits. In Souvenirs et Voyages. Edited by
Pierre Masson, Daniel Durosay, and Martine Sagaert. Paris: Gallimard,
Pléiade, 2001.
Le Prométhée mal enchainé. In Romans et Récits. Vol. 1. Edited by Pierre Masson.
Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2009.
Lacan, Jacques. “Radiophone.” In Autres Écrits. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Paris: Seuil, 2001. 403–406.
Le Séminaire. Livre XVI. D’un Autre à l’autre. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Paris: Seuil, 2006.
Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co.,
2006.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Samuel Moor
and Edward Aveling. New York: Modern Library, 1906.
“Supplementary to Dedicated Verses: Some Chapters from Scorpion and Felix:
A Humoristic Novel.” In Collected Works. Vol. 1. New York: International
Publishers, 1975. 616–632.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. In Collected Works. Vol. 5.
New York: International Publishers, 1976.
61
Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Selected Writings. Part 2, 1931–1934, vol. 2., trans.
Edmund Jephcott and ed. Michael William Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005), 678.
chapter 6
Mother-pumper and the analyst’s donuts

Jamieson Webster
Is laughter in psychoanalysis subversive? Does it erupt in the same way as a

slip of the tongue or a dream? Is it a sudden fascinating bodily appearance
in a knowledge that points beyond conscious control? Is humor finally
defensive, a release of hatred or depressive anxieties that passes through the
censor precisely because they are disavowed in the form of a joke? Is
laughter in fact conservative, an expenditure made in order to finally
conserve? A preservation of one’s cherished identity? And finally, is
laughter feminine or phallic? Is the undoing of laughter associated with
femininity, castration, or, said differently, does laughter have anything to
do with the question of sexual difference?
These questions haunt recent work on comedy, laughter, jokes, and
humor in relation to psychoanalysis, emphasizing something like a
bifurcation in theory. Even Freud seems caught in an internal split – his
earlier theory placing jokes on the side of defense, while his late theory of
humor tends toward a new idea of the subversion of internal agencies, a
kind of overturning of the super-ego in humor. As is often the case with
psychoanalysis, it is best to turn to clinical practice for an answer, looking
to the specificity of what one finds in the clinical encounter.
When thinking of laughter, a series of psychoanalytic sessions with a
young boy of 17 immediately came to mind. There was a lot of laughter in
these sessions, and later, while reflecting upon them. I smile when I think
of this piece of work. But like the strange insularity of an analytic session,
one has to wonder if this humor is at all communicable. Who thinks
someone else’s analysis is funny? And doesn’t the seriousness of
psychoanalysis, the time and investment, preclude laughing about it? Or
on the contrary, does it make laughing about it necessary? Most interesting
in this particular piece of analytic work is that humor meets with violence.
Humor is found at the hinge of an encounter with one’s own sadism, that
sadism acting as a basis for the comedic action. These sessions straddle the
two theories of humor in psychoanalysis moving toward a kind of tipping
104
Mother-pumper and the analyst’s donuts 105
point where humor from a more conservative defensive position evolves
into something more radical. The capture of sadism in humor shows
sadism as something more transgressive than outright aggressivity, and
this difference seems crucial.
A crucial element in the distinction between one form of humor and
the other is an encounter with jouissance and its transformation into
subjective desire. The subject, we might say, through this encounter,
locates a new position, appearing and announcing itself in the form of a
laugh. Following this logic, we might say that jouissance without desire is
anything but funny, and desire alone is not funny enough, tending more
toward the tragic. Taken together, desire coupled with the intensity that
jouissance lends to it through the register of the drive – repetition, the
real of the body, and that traumatic kernel beyond symbolization – we
have the setting for a possible humorous know-how: the symptomatic
comedy of everyday life.
Let me begin . . . A boy walks into an analyst’s office . . . Three years
later, she forces him to write down his dreams spontaneously in a session
where he played at telling and not telling, remembering and not
remembering what he dreamt over the weekend. “Write it down! Get a
notebook! Bring it next week!” I bellowed. He would write the following
dream: “I am in an old medical room, you know, like the ones you see in
the pictures that they use for teaching, like they are round and there are
bleachers where people watch. You know what I’m talking about. Yes?
Well, it’s there, and I can’t see who is in the audience; it’s all blurry
anonymous faces, and I’m on an operating table, and you are there. . . and
you are carving me like a turkey. Just removing huge chunks of me and
putting them in a bucket, throwing them in there, piece after piece . . . You
were just going at it! I mean you were carving me like a bloody turkey! And
everyone was watching. You sadist! Like it was nothing, just cutting
away.. . . and I don’t want you to know how much it hurts.”
After much discussion of the dream – a dream he more or less inter-
preted himself with ease – I asked him if I was going at it because I didn’t
know that it hurt him. He had said that he hid it very well. He replied that
he didn’t know, but then asked me directly, “Now that you do know, will
you do anything differently?” I looked at him quizzically. “Probably not,”
he said, “because you are so god damn evil.. . . That look on your face.”
”But, this was a lot of fun, more fun than I thought,” he added.
The dream had a profound impact on me. First of all, it was funny when
he was telling it to me, playing at accusing me of being a sadist. Here
violence and humor mix with rapid force, a sardonic attack that stretches
106 jamieson webster
in both directions. And, on a more touching side, this young man more or
less reimagined the primal scene of psychoanalysis: Charcot with the
hysterics at the Salpêtrière, adding the element of cutting so important
to Lacan. The analyst has probably always been a demonic Faustian figure
who demands a pound of flesh; the one whose desire is imagined to be a
desire for something brutal. His appeal to me not to do anything differ-
ently in the face of his pain is certainly a desire he holds for himself, a wish
to be able to sustain his desire in the face of my extracting a pound of flesh.
Jouissance has the force of a transgressive violence in the dream, which
served as a first link to a question about jouissance that he began to ask in
the analysis. It is certainly also a response to my having displayed my desire
as analyst, forcing him to bring me dreams. The weirdness of the analytic
relationship is contained in the image of the turkey-carving in the
amphitheater, translating the untranslatable act of talking about dreams
and about jouissance. Is a comedic undertone what allows this dream not
to be simply a nightmare? Is this humor a problem? Is this a veil before the
real? Or, does it open the possibility of something else, perhaps something
like sublimation?
He had another dream: “I jack a car, pulling the driver from the driver’s
seat, get in, drive it recklessly, crash it, get out, and do it again. I jack
another car, pull the driver out, drive it around the block, crash it, do it
again.. . . And then, guess what?” He looks at me. “What?” I respond. He
makes a comedic well-timed pause. . . . “Well . . . I jack another car, pull
the driver to the ground, get in, drive it around the block, crash it, I jack
another car, pull the driver to the ground, get in, drive it around the block,
crash it, and I do it again. And again, and again.” There was a joke in the
dream about repetition, repetition itself a pivot between humor and its
other side, brute tragedy. He allows this other side, and his fear, to creep
in: “it felt like it went on forever, it felt like it would never stop.”
Lacan famously told the dream of a patient of his at a conference in
Leuven in 1969 who dreamed of an infinity of lives springing from herself
in succession, a Pascalian dream of being engulfed in an infinity from
which she awoke half mad. As the audience burst into laughter, he assured
them that while it might seem funny, it was not in the slightest bit funny
to the woman who dreamed it. He underlines that repetition is madness
incarnate and my patient’s car-jacking dream is mad. The – as he put it –
“endless, pointless, chaotic, violence” was a metaphor for his tie to his
mother – a maddening masturbatory jacking-off game that they both
shared and which neither could end. “It ends when I pull her down with
me,” he told me in a state of glee. “I’m in this fight to the death. I’ve got it
all mapped out.” And he did, it is true. He had been telling me the rules of
the game for the previous year.
The jouissance in this dream was even more palpable than the first.
There in the sexual language – “pull her down with me” – but also in the
very rhythm of the dream, pulling one off again and again and again. “And
you spare me such torture?” I asked him at one point. “I don’t think I can
win against you,” he quipped. This is not entirely true since some game of
withholding was certainly at play: an obsessive strategy that I took on by
force, forcing him to tell me his dreams. It is not a tactic I generally use,
but something moved me to try and break up a kind of deadly repetition.
One lives through games of jouissance, games that my patient managed to
force (with difficulty) into the intersubjective arena. I did him the service
of likewise forcing some of this into the arena or perhaps better,
amphitheater, of his psychoanalysis.
His satisfaction, from my perspective, was never totally insular,
although it had become so during earlier periodic severe depressions as
well as for periods in the analysis. Three years into treatment, he could
exude a new charm in certain contexts in his life, in particular when he
“played games” with his friends, with authority, and with girls. The game
is something he loves to constantly renew, with greater and greater
demonic force, an upping of the stakes that he relishes. He attributes,
in the dream, this demonic force to me, the analyst, someone who he sees
as asking him to play every session. Every session feels like a renewal of a
command. What are you going to talk about today? How far will we take
this? This is how I would describe the particular exigency of his question
that emerges in his analysis: In what way can we play with an elusive
pleasure, always bordering on sadism, so that we aren’t just engaged in
pointless repetition?
After the carjacking dream, I pointed out to him that he wanted his own
car, that for the first time he would be in the driver’s seat if he got one, and
that most of the fights with his mother that I can remember took place
with him in the passenger seat, especially when she drove him to see me.
“I’m going to car jack that bitch, pull her out of the driver’s seat,” he
squealed with delight. He then told me that the car he picked out turned
out to be the same car his father had when he was young. A Datsun. He
didn’t remember that. His mother told him. I don’t doubt that the “Da”
joined to the “son” in the name of the car is coincidental. But then again,
I wouldn’t. And in any case, the name-of-the-father constantly circulates in
this story; there even in the position of the one who carves the turkey on
Thanksgiving. We are thankful that there is this third.
Is it always this iteration of an Oedipal story that is the force behind
repetition – violent, incestuously sexual, hilariousness? Does masturbatory
jouissance always rear its head in a joke, the play of the punch line? What
transformation makes repetition humorous and not simply tragic? Sheer
symptomatic repetition in treatments, as many of us know, feels lethal, and
we perk up as the work of analysis mutates this repetition into something
else. But the something else, at least as I’m thinking of it with this patient,
is still repetition.
It brings to mind Lacan’s early distinction between the repetition of a
need and the need for repetition. The first he locates as a collapse of desire
into interminable need and frustration, landing one in the stuck economy
of the imaginary. The second – the need for repetition – is located more on
the boundary between the symbolic and the real, the place where language
brings itself to bear on one’s desire, forcing us into an interminable search
for what is already lost. The drive is structured through repetition, but
repetition always brings with it some difference. If we search time and
again for the same lost object, turning around this hole, we nonetheless can
find our self somewhere new and unexpected. The drive needs the force of
repetition – transgressive, on the edge of violence, often flying in the face
of reality – with which it carves a trajectory in the world. But it is not the
aim in the end, which in any case is a kind of eternal return, if not an
encounter with a cause for renewal, but rather the way taken.
Heidegger made an important distinction between the repetition of
tradition and the repetition of heritage. Tradition is the repetition of
something dead and sedimented; heritage is a reactivated tradition that is
submitted to what Heidegger calls Wiederholung, which can be translated
as both repetition and fetching back. The condition for newness in
Heidegger is paradoxically repetition, the repetition of repetition, a kind
of second order repetition of greater intensity. Not, I would say, the
bitching in the car that happened over and over and over, but the wild
exclamation: “Carjack that bitch!” It reminds me of Lacan’s command,
taken from Revelations, to “eat the book.” This command is not dissimilar
from Lacan’s ethical injunction: have you lived in conformity with the
desire that is in you.
Having linked desire to the lost object, the object eaten that can now be
raised up, there is a kind of faith put in desire, in the hole in which it
always escapes. Like the Heideggerian potter who sculpts his vase around
an interior emptiness, what is made is made there. And this is the work of
repetition, infinite carjacking, but whose point is this acknowledged
horizon of jouissance. Jouissance contains history, a history that is fetched
back, relived, repeated, if not sublimated. Importantly, one of my patient’s
main symptoms was kleptomania. The car he doesn’t know that he
infinitely steals, drives, and crashes is his father’s. Far from this being a
renunciation of a wish, the analysis brings about its demonic fulfillment.
He tells me another dream: “I am at my grandparent’s house and they
tell me we have to hide this gun from my mother. I don’t know why or
what they are worried about. My mother comes in and gets me and tells
me I have to go with her. We are in her car. I remember driving past an
airport, I don’t know how to explain it, but it was on stilts, or a second
story. She turned a corner and says, to me ‘I’m going to get pumped!’ She
takes me to a place called motherland where they take her motherstuff.”
“Motherstuff?” I ask
“Yeah, well,” he says sheepishly, “you know, babies and milk.”
“Oh, pumped,” I say.
“Yeah, I figured it out at that point.”
We both start laughing as the look on his face seems to embody the
slippage between pumped and pumped. He carries on: “So there we were
in motherland. I don’t like it there. I really don’t like it there. I want to
leave. I go outside and there is a pack of zombies eating people. Their
mouths are red around the edges, like when children are eating cherry
popsicles.”
“Except it’s blood?” I ask
“Except it’s blood . . . thank you. And the people are just disappearing,
one by one. I run down the street and I stop. I look across the street and
I see you inside a donut shop. Bright, yellow, and there you are, happy as
Larry, just selling donuts, with a hat and an apron, the whole thing, all
smiles, all donuts. Just like you always are, sitting inside this office.”
“Where I sell donuts?” I ask.
“Yup, you and your damn donuts,” he says.
“So I’m wondering if I should go in there, your donut shop. It doesn’t
seem like a place to stay. I look down the street and I see this girl, you know
the one I told you about (a love interest), and she’s walking into a church
and I can’t tell if it’s another one of these places, vampire, motherland, lair
where they pump you. Mother-pumper place. Or is it somewhere safe.
Then I look down the street and the zombies appear and we meet eyes,
which is bad, you know it’s going to be bad when your eyes connect with a
zombie.”
“And then what?” I ask with anticipation.
“And then I disappear. I can’t figure out in which direction to move.” He
pauses. “I’m sick of your donuts, I’m sick of my Mother, I don’t know
about this girl, all the god damn zombies. I’m sick of it all.”
I will tell you the follow-up to this dream, ending this segment of an analysis
that I wanted to present today. But first, shouldn’t we all breathe a sigh of
relief: at least the analyst’s donuts have a hole. If milk and babies and
motherstuff are not entirely distinct from donuts, that also have a flair of
the maternal about them, something to be sick of or sick on like the rest, the
difference is in the structure! We have donut on the one hand, and pumped
on the other. Is it the impressive orality of the dream that brings this hole
with it? Does the mother, losing her phallus (gun), lead to the unraveling of
the pumping scene? Pumping certainly seemed like the decentered center of
the dream: a word that moves between aggression (pump a gun), excitement
(pumped!), being depleted or parasitically vampirized (pumped), sexuality
(pumping), and finally, hopefully more analytically, the draining of jouis-
sance, the creation of a space of lack that we begin to see in the next
iterations of the dream work. We analysts, one could say, not only make
donuts, dough off of nutters, the selling of a no or nothing, psychoanalysts
are also mother-pumpers. Happy as Larry, a sump-pump, or the pimp of all
pumps. I could really go on . . . What if Adam Lanza’s mother had preferred
donuts to being pumped on guns? I’ll stop.
He had many associations in this session and the next, and a week later
he ran away from home, re-enacting the end of the dream by literally
disappearing. Far from a moment of the aphanisis of his desire, letting it
slip away from him and disappear, in the act of running away he brought
his desire forward. It was an impulsive act for sure, and he showed up to
my donut shop-office, bag in tow with his favorite pillow that had never
left his bed, and all his other things he might need, like his favorite DVDs,
visibly weighing on his shoulder. But, he showed up, it must be said, to his
regularly scheduled appointment.
This running away was a separation that had two very interesting
consequences. His mother decided after this event to get him a place to
live separately from her while he finished High School – the fighting
between them, she finally acknowledged, was too much and try though
they may, neither could stop. Second – and this in part explained the
airport in the dream – my patient had never really been away from his
mother. He had not gone to summer camp or anything else that kids do
that make for short separations. He had gone to visit a friend in Buffalo to
see what college life was like about two months before the sequence I am
telling you about. It was his first trip away (something I didn’t know or
didn’t appreciate fully) and his mother drove him to the airport just like in
the dream. He ended up stranded in Buffalo for a week longer than
planned because of Hurricane Sandy.
He told me that he was miserable on this trip. He didn’t know anyone;
he didn’t know where to go; he didn’t know what to do; he had no clean
clothes, slept in random places; the dorm bathrooms were filthy, and he
just felt sick to himself and terrified of going to college. He had hoped that
this trip would provide a point of relief from the awful year of failing in
school and endlessly fighting with his mother. He was hoping that he
would feel free. But it didn’t feel that way. He hadn’t told me this. He just
came back listless and defeated.
“What didn’t feel free?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I was worried about what my mother was going to do if
I wasn’t there (hide the gun). I think I’ve always worried about that.”
“In what context?” I asked.
He detailed a history of her abusive relationship (she was the instigator)

with a man he lived with from an early age. I knew about this, but I did
not hear it like I heard it this time.
“That was more the problem, this worry, than just hating Buffalo,
which is still a total shithole, don’t get me wrong, but I think I was
preoccupied by that, that and the friggen storm or Hurricane or whatever.
Oh, yeah she had to pump out the basement which was flooded. Don’t
say another word about that.. . .” He continued, “And the thing about
running away was that I didn’t do anything I don’t normally do at home,
but for once I wasn’t doing them or not doing them because of her.
I didn’t care, somehow, about what she was doing; I think she’ll probably
be happier, and I think I used to feel that if she was miserable without me
or happy without me, that I had somehow lost and she had won, you
know the fight I’m having with her for eternity . . . I just didn’t feel that
way this time when I ran away.”
The analysis, of course, continues on, but the wonderful vicissitudes of
turkey carving, carjacking, popsicle cannibalism, stealing and pumping and
disappearing, vampire lairs and the analyst’s donuts, are not forgotten. Last
week the donuts were on a conveyer belt and he was peeing on them. We
spoke a great deal about active urethral jouissance as opposed to the passive
brutality of erections – he never ceases to amaze me – but that’s perhaps
another story, to go along with an exposition of his new favorite TV show
Bates Motel, the story of how Norman Bates became Norman Bates, him
when his mother was still alive. I’m sure the show is totally hilarious.
What has changed from my perspective is that repetition in this
treatment has a strikingly different character. It always comes with a bit
of humor, with a lightness of touch. It has lost a certain fixity that the
death drive can lend to it, unraveled in these sessions with the carjacking
dream, the highpoint of its appearance. Humor, in the end, is not a
negation of death or loss, or indeed of the seriousness of his (albeit sexual)
rage toward his mother; it contains them in a rather passionate and
comedic play. The body is there, as it is in so much of humor in its oral,
anal, and genital variants: the body in all its tragic-comedic glory and
decay. For my patient, his symptomatic relinquishing of desire and col-
lapse into depressive reveling in jouissance becomes in these sessions
instead a kind of driven know-how whose signature or stamp is the
humorousness of sadistic momentum: carving, carjacking, crashing,
pumping, and peeing even. If there is an object to all of this drive, it is,
in the end, the nothing of what the analyst offers, speech of course from
one angle, but also the first part of the mother’s body taken in and lost,
incorporated in the form of the oral object. Let us always call them the
analyst’s donuts.
So when I think of the image of me with my donuts, it is perhaps the
sweetest image I have received of the position of the analyst from a patient.
There I am, up in that donut shop, with my hat and my apron, always
selling the same thing – donuts. A place to go, but not a place to stay. For
myself, the next time I have to confront Lacan with his donuts – those
long, tedious, endlessly repetitive passages on the torus or the Klein bottle
(which from what I can tell is just a really weird donut) I will think of my
patient and I will run away!
W O RK S CI T ED
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992.
Wolff, Françoise. “Lacan Speaks, Jacques Lacan Parle.” www.youtube.com/watch?
v=31iQQTPY-kA
chapter 7
Not in the humor

Bulimic dreams
Carol Owens
Sometimes we’re simply not-in-the-humor: not for love, not for work, not
for pleasure, perhaps not even for life itself. This essay examines the trope
and condition of “anhedonia” as the ultimate effect of an absence of
humor. What is under special scrutiny here is Freud’s idea from 1927 that
the superego – until then figured as the agency in the psyche that heaps
torment upon the ego in the form of prohibitions and restrictions of
pleasure – behaves differently, and in so doing allows for a yield of pleasure
to be experienced. In short, according to Freud, it is humor that is
permitted by the superego; it is humor that allows the poor ego respite
from persecution and the chance of a bit of a laugh. This essay examines
Freud’s newly imagined superego and considers how humor, superego, and
jouissance are coordinated together, first in relation to the films Annie Hall
and Synechdoche New York, second in relation to the Hippocratic practice
of Humoralism, and last in relation to the dreams of a bulimic girl in order
to explore what is going on for the subject when she is not-in-the-humor.
Apparently, the first title Woody Allen had in mind for his classic film
Annie Hall was “Anhedonia.” Allen’s various narrations of his own and his
protagonists’ anhedonia is often, for the viewer, the point of acutely
delicious blackest humor. However, what Allen also manages to do in
his films is to show us how, even though we complain of a lack of pleasure,
or experience an inability to enjoy ourselves, we can even complain that
our suffering itself (due to the absence of pleasure) is not enough! In his
opening joke in Annie Hall about the two Jewish women complaining
about the food in a restaurant, he tells us that one woman complains that
the food is bad and the other agrees and adds that if this were not bad
enough, the portion sizes are too small! In other words, at some level, it
appears that we also enjoy our suffering and sometimes even ask for an
encore. Psychoanalysts understand this curious aspect of the human condi-
tion as the very thing that Lacan calls Jouissance. Of course, Freud was the
one who invented a name for this oddball unconscious agency, which
113
114 carol owens
appears to condition our ability to enjoy ourselves on the one hand, and
our compulsion to “enjoy” ourselves – as if we were commanded to do so
by some nameless, faceless Other – on the other hand. We can see this
agency – namely, the superego – hard at work in the first scene in Annie
Hall, which takes place in the consulting room of “Doctor Flicker.” Alvie –
the protagonist – age eight or nine perhaps, is brought by his mother to the
Doctor because he “is depressed and doesn’t want to do anything (not even
his homework!).” Alvie remarks that there is little point in doing anything
since the universe is expanding and sooner or later will implode.
A cigarette-touting Dr. Flicker ridicules Alvie’s concerns about the uni-
verse and what he prescribes for Alvie’s condition is enjoyment for as long as
the universe exists. He loudly proclaims: “we gotta enjoy ourselves while
we’re here ha ha ha ha ha ha.” This “gotta enjoy” can surely be heard as the
imperative of the superego.
In 1927 in his little paper “On Humor” Freud had claimed that humor
is made possible through the agency of the superego. As he put it: “. . .[in]
a particular situation the subject suddenly hypercathects his super-ego and
then, proceeding from it, alters the reactions of the ego.”1 The conceptual
development he installs here that humor is made possible by the agency of the
superego is hugely important. In this move Freud broadens the modality of
the yield of this contribution of the superego such that the end result is not
merely or even, laughter, but as he puts it: a yield of pleasure made possible
by the superego’s condescension.2 In this way, Freud enlarges the func-
tional scope of the superego insofar as it allows the subject to enjoy this
yield of pleasure in a way that appears to oppose the strictly prohibitive
function of the Oedipal superego and its paradoxical alternative – the
strictly obligated injunction to enjoy associated with id-driven jouissance.
The presence of humor is for Freud, then, an index of the triumph of
narcissism, the ego, and the pleasure principle, all designated as the spoils
of a “rebellious” victory. Humor, made possible by the superego, wages
war on jouissance! What a radical idea. Radical, precisely because it not
only questions the function of the superego conceptualized until this point
by Freud as the severe, prohibiting, moral agency in the psyche; it also
appears that humor neutralizes jouissance itself. If we think of the anhe-
donic subject as one for whom the capacity to enjoy pleasure is absent – let
us say in Freud’s terms that she lacks the necessary humor required to be
1
Sigmund Freud, “On Humor,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (1927), 165.
2
Ibid., 166.
Not in the humor: Bulimic dreams 115
allowed to take pleasure – she is also the one for whom this very absence of
humor is itself something that we can identify as jouissance. In the style of
Jewish Lady number two from Allen’s joke, “not only do I not take
pleasure in what I am eating (the food is bad), I take my (encore of)
jouissance on the side as the name of my absence of pleasure and my
suffering (the portions are too small).” We can even put it like this: not
only do I not enjoy, rather I enjoy myself not being able to enjoy. The
absence of pleasure in living and the jouissance incorporated in this
anhedonic state are well observed in the clinical picture of depression
already noted and well described by Freud in his Mourning and Melan-
cholia paper.3 Here, the ego is worthless and found to be morally despic-
able, and this “truth” appears to be the founding condition for the
incapacity to take, or better said . . . be allowed to take, any pleasure in
living. The many and cruel self-reproaches, loss of interest in love, and in
life all index the subject’s impoverishment of the ego. Freud’s remarks on
the superego from 1927, as such, revolutionarily suggest that the superego
in allowing the possibility of humor cancels out or neutralizes jouissance
since jouissance is another name for the encore of suffering of the anhe-
donic condition.
Dry humor
My sixteen-year-old son finally persuaded me to watch Synechdoche New
York, and I’d have to say that my first viewing left me feeling fairly
humorless myself. Before watching it a second time, however, and much
to my amazement, I came across a review that lauded it as a “great black
comedy.” Scores of commentaries, virtual kilometers on internet threads
and blogs alike have been dedicated to the exposition of the themes and
motifs in this film, each one claiming to have a more secure grasp of
Kaufman’s directorial debut piece. In fact, we don’t have to scratch the
surface at all hard to discover immanent psychoanalytic pathology at work
in both the playwright protagonist Caden Cotard with the nominal
reference to Cotard’s syndrome, and his wife Adele Lack, whose name
signifies at least a passing engagement with Lacanian subjectivity. “Being
Caden Cotard” might well have served as an alternate title for this film
given Kaufman’s obsession with literally inhabiting other men’s heads4.
3
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 246.
4
Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the 1999 film Being John Malkovich.
116 carol owens
Cotard’s name is a reference to Jules Cotard, whose discovery in 1880 of
“negation delirium” in turn came to be known as Cotard’s syndrome. The
syndrome chiefly consists in the delusion that one is already dead, or
doesn’t exist, or that part of one’s body is putrefying, or has in some ways
bled or drained away. In addition the syndrome is defined by despair and
self-loathing, a loss of interest in any activity, and zero reaction or response
to pleasurable stimuli. Indeed, we too might despair if we felt that we were
already dead, or that we were in the business of losing organs. Clearly,
Cotard’s syndrome elegantly serves as Kaufman’s mechanism to describe
the mental and physical deterioration of his character throughout the film.
But what struck me in particular was the cinematic treatment of Caden
Cotard’s manifest anhedonic state, his emotional and physiological decline
over the course of the movie commensurate with his draining away.
Because director Charlie Kaufman obsessively and rather pointedly cata-
logues the excretion and secretion of Cotard’s various bodily liquids, I’m
going to also recognize this draining away of his bodily liquids as a
reference to the archaic location of human mood in the body’s “humors.”
Indeed, Kaufman (perhaps unconsciously) makes much of this Hellenistic
location of human mood in the color of the body’s very “waters.” The
Hippocratic theory of Humoralism is regarded as the first recorded histor-
ical explanation for the emergence of disease that didn’t attribute etiology
to supernatural causes. The Hippocratic Corpus, in which the theory of
Humoralism was first introduced to a literate audience, consists of about
sixty treatises, the bulk of which were written between 430 and 330 BC.5
Although the work was originally attributed to Hippocrates of Cos from
around 460 BC, commentators are now in agreement that the theory is the
combined effort of the work of a large number of medical authors
belonging to different schools of thought. Health and illness were regarded
together as a form of balance and imbalance of fluid or chymoi, a term that
has come to be translated as “Humors.” The author of On the Nature of
Man, one of the Hippocratic treatises, argued that health was a state in
which the four Humors were in correct proportion, strength, and quantity
to each other and that illness emerged when the Humors were deficient, in
excess, or separated from one another.6 In particular, bile and phlegm were
seen as being the causes of diseases, because they appeared to flow out of
5
Afkhami, Amir Arsalan, Encyclopaedia Iranica (2004), www.iranicaonline.org/articles/humoralism-1
See also the print edition, vol. 12, Fasc. 6, 566–570.
6
Vivian Nutton, “Humoralism,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 1, eds.
W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 286–87.
the body during a person’s illness with seasonal regularity. This tracking,
monitoring, measurement, and eventual draining of the “wet stuff” of the
human condition – the inter-, intra-, and extracellular stuff, the milk,
semen, and all the “pusses” (mucus, blood, phlegm, lochia), the biles –
black for melancholy, yellow for anger – started with the Hellenists. This
archaic and curious location of human mood in the color of the body’s
very “waters” has robustly endured such that in our time to speak of mood
is to speak of (the) humor(s) without contradiction. We can still be in
black humor, see red, go green, feel blue, and more generally look on the
bright side of things or be in a dark mood. Synechdoche New York opens
with Cotard’s seven year-old-daughter sitting on the toilet having a bowel
movement, which turns out to be green. During the next few scenes we
witness with him the eruptions and emissions of his red blood, his own
black shit, his brown piss, the emergence of the festering and oozing
pimples and boils on his face, even the aqueous and vitreous humors of
his eyeballs! In his theatrical project, he wants his cast members to steep
themselves in what he calls a “communal bath,” or Mikvah, of menstrual
blood and nocturnal emissions.
Things reach a radical pitch in the film insofar as Cotard’s humors are
draining away from him to the point even that he cannot ejaculate,
salivate, or cry any longer. Here we might see that what is drained away
is his ability to sustain himself as a “humorous” subject, as a subject who
enjoys pleasure. In a curious moment, Cotard at his “dry-est” point is at
the same time at his most humor-less. Dry humor is in this case the
production of a strange kind of oxymoronic alchemy! Although it is at
least worth mentioning in this regard that the humors in their earliest
descriptions could be “dry” or “wet.”
Wet humor
In this respect our contemporary references to “being drained” or even
“bled-dry” when referring to our physiological or emotional wellbeing take
us right back to the whole business of bloodletting and induced vomiting
performed as the most common medical practice for the two thousand
years leading up to the late nineteenth century. It appears that Avicenna,
the first Persian physician to build on the Galeno-Hippocratic tradition of
Humoralism, is the one responsible for almost two millennia of bloodlet-
ting.7 His view of disease, as articulated in his Ketāb al-qānun fi’l-tebb,
_
7
Afkhami, Encyclopaedia Iranica.
118 carol owens
integrated the Hippocratic views of humoral primacy with Galenic pre-
cepts of temperamental predispositions to disease. Avicenna’s advocating
the poly-humoral quality of blood is regarded as having popularized the
practice of bloodletting and leaching, particularly as the result of dissemi-
nations of his work in the West. Avicenna’s influence on orthodox
medicine in Persia lasted up to the advent of the clinico-pathological
movement in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century.8 It was
not until the regulatory medical licensing laws of the early years of the
twentieth century that Humoralism was obliged to withdraw from the
terrain of orthodox and legally sanctioned medical practice, but it has
continued to thrive in the realm of folk medicine and Naturopathy.9
The idea that one’s “humor” is predicated upon or in some way
connected with the body’s organs and its fluids is still however wholly
resonant with alternate and complementary medicine discourse and nicely
exemplified in the comments of this naturopath and her “detox” holiday
experience as recorded on her blog:
Now as an experimental naturopath I have done detoxes! I’ve done
smoothie fasts, anti-candida diets, low reactive eating programs, liver herbs,
parasite cleanses, kidney flushes and coffee enemas! By the time we arrived
at the retreat I was dying for fresh fruit and vegetables and actually craving
the start of our 5 day juice fast! Once I took the excess toxins out of my diet
and stopped over-stimulating my liver, my mind slowly started to calm
down.10
It is not all that surprising that the notion of our humor being conditioned
by our humors still has cultural currency; after all, two thousand years of
bloodletting and purging is difficult to argue with. Not surprising then, is
our contemporary fascination with colonic irrigation and liposuction. But
what about the cutting and the bulimic evacuations of the contemporary
melancholic subject? We can also consider these as the desperate
8
Joseph Desirée Tholozan, Rapport à Sa Majesté le Chah sur l’état actuel de l’hygiène en Perse (Tehran
1869), cited in Afkhami.
9
See Byron J. Good, “The Heart of What’s the Matter: The Semantics of Illness in Iran,” Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry 1,1 (1977): 25–58. It is also worth noting, however, that although the practice
of bloodletting has all but disappeared from medical discourse in its Humoralist variation, it is still
the case that therapeutic phlebotomies are carried out in the treatment of specific conditions. For
example, the genetic condition of hereditary hemochromatosis, in which there is a build-up of iron
in the red blood cells, is treated by the draining of blood until iron levels drop to acceptable levels.
Also the treatment of polycythemia ruba vera, where the bone marrow’s functioning leads to the
blood becoming too thick and the risk of clotting and strokes, involves phlebotomy.
10
Rhianna, “Understanding & Accepting Emotional Detoxification,” Embracing Health (blog),
March 26, 2012, www.embracinghealthblog.com/2012/03/26/understanding-accepting-emotional-
detoxification/.
operations on the body to bring about a drainage of an excess jouissance to
restore the body to a point of being where living (in one’s body) is for the
moment once again minimally tolerable. I will return to this idea later on
in connection with a case of my own.
I have so far coordinated this state of being “not-in-the-humor” with the
anhedonic inability to enjoy pleasure. I have indicated that the draining
away of something excessive in the subject is on the one hand entirely
caught up with a two thousand-year-old legacy of bloodletting and purging
predicated upon the Hellenistic inspired practice of Humoralism; and on
the other hand, sutured together with signification around loss of desire
and incapacity to experience pleasure that betoken an essentially anhedo-
nic, melancholic subjectivity. As such, “humor” since its first usage in
connection with human wellbeing acts as a lynchpin for the articulation of
excess, which as phlegm, bile, blood, vomit, toxins, and so on must be
drained away, and which in the modality of pleasure-yielding, pace Freud,
must be conditioned by the superego. Strictly speaking, “being humor-
less” denotes the subject who is drained of excess – disease-bearing humors
for the Humoralists, organ/mind-blocking toxins for the naturopath,
jouissance for the contemporary subject who cannot otherwise regulate
pleasure. It could even be that the almost two thousand-year-old practice
of Humoralism has been at least in some part attempting to treat the
symptoms that are typically correlated by Lacanian psychoanalysis with
superego, especially since among the list of “illnesses” that emerged as the
result of imbalanced humors, according to each type of temperament
(Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic), we find what otherwise
reads as a version of the seven deadly sins: hedonism, lust, impulsivity,
anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth. These are precisely the kinds of effects on
the subject that Lacanian psychoanalysis correlates with the greed of
jouissance.11 The whole business of going beyond, of indulging in excess,
and the effects upon and treatment of the subject are well documented in
such treasures as the Salernitan Rule of Health from the twelfth or thir-
teenth century but also of course in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, especially
in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” which emphatically underscores the medieval
picture of moderation in consumption as entirely at stake in the balancing
of the humors on the one hand and in the balancing of the humor on the
other, especially as excess of one form or another, most interestingly for my
11
In fact, Miller in his 1981 Buenos Aires “Seminar on the Superego” refers to the greed of jouissance.
See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Clinca del superyo,” in Conferencias Portenas Tomo I (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Paidos SAICF, 2009).
120 carol owens
purposes, causes the production of a dream that is interpreted, both by the
dreamer (The Cock) and his favorite wife, and the treatment advocated
relies upon a fasting and purging.
It would seem that there is a very long association of the superego with
humor even if for a couple of thousand years of that tradition, the superego
as the agency of the psyche set up as arbiter of jouissance only enters the
scene in any kind of formalized way with Freud. The question remains
though as to the circumstances where it is possible that the superego via
humor permits the subject a yield of pleasure. Especially, as it isn’t even
guaranteed – to paraphrase Freud from 1927 – that the superego will afford
you a comic slope at all.12
Superego: Friend or foe?

I like the idea that your superego can be your amigo!13 But, it’s not at all
straightforward to see how (or even if) this comes about in Freud’s
conceptual development of the superego. For, while it is the case that
Freud comes up with a unique version of the superego in his paper “On
Humor” of 1927, in every other mention of the superego in his writings
up to 1927 and later it is the superego in its various prohibiting,
censoring, critical self-observing, conscience-upholding, and maintenance
of the ego-ideal functions that we encounter. Moreover, in his conceptu-
alizations of the superego, Freud nearly always admits to the holes and
gaps in his thinking; in practically every paper where he sketches it he
admits to further paradoxes, conundrums, and logical impossibilities. We
might well wonder then, how Freud came up with the idea that the
superego – suddenly – does an “about-face” and finding the ego insignifi-
cant, like a distracted pet, wanders off to wreak havoc or have a bit of fun
elsewhere. What is usually thought of as the paradox of the superego
consists of the move from the Freudian strictly censoring/prohibiting of
(incestuous) pleasure to the late Lacanian conceptualization of superego
as agency of jouissance in its imperative conjugation. Strictly speaking,
there is no paradox if we take into account that the superego doesn’t
effectively prohibit jouissance: rather it is superego that pushes the
subject into situations of transgressive enjoyment that cause suffering
12
Ibid.
13
Simon Critchley refers to the superego as “amigo” in his book On Humor where he sketches out his
ideas about Superego I and II and his analysis of Freud’s paper on Humor. See Simon Critchley, On
Humor (Thinking in Action) (London: Routledge, 2002).
rather than pleasure, and as Adrian Johnston has pointed out, the
jouissance obtained is never what was expected.14 But the paradox of
the superego introduced by Freud in 1927 consists in his conceptualizing
of a superego that allows the ego its moment in the sun, in finding the
ego and the ego’s concerns ridiculous, just backs off entirely, and it is in
this way that a yield of pleasure is permitted, where the beleaguered
subject can laugh in the face of potential annihilation (as per Freud’s
opening joke), or in more ordinary terms perhaps, laugh off what might
otherwise cause anguish. In his writings and comments on humor,
Critchley makes much of the potential of the therapeutic and antidepres-
sant effects he correlates with this function of the superego in Freud.15 Of
course, we can see the beneficial aspects of humor on human mood in all
but the most tragic of human situations and even then of course we speak
of tragi-comedy. There is even “humor therapy” on offer for the relief of
physical suffering and pain in cancer and other diseases in some hospitals
in the United States, where special rooms with “humorous” materials and
volunteers are provided with the intention of causing laughter. What is
recognized in these treatment centers is the group of effects in the body
brought about by laughter such as increased oxygenation of the blood,
and short-term changes in hormone levels and some neurotransmitters.
But this is nothing new. We find one of the earliest mentions of the
“health benefits” of humor in the Book of Proverbs, and as early as the
thirteenth century humor was used by surgeons to distract patients from
the pain brought about by surgery. The notion that humor can condition
the object that causes pain and suffering, of the physical or indeed mental
kind, thereby bringing about therapeutic effects, is richly rendered in a
great scene from the third film in the Harry Potter series.16 The children
are gathered around Professor Lupin as he proceeds to take them through
a new spell entitled – “Riddikulus!” The genius of J.K. Rowling here
effectively neutralizes the self-lacerating effects of the superego (in this
case, most definitely Critchley’s “Superego I”), as the children are encour-
aged to think about a feared object/figure in their lives – in most cases
one that would destroy them, physically, mentally, or both – and then to
14
See Adrian Johnston, “The Forced Choice of Enjoyment: Jouissance between Expectation and
Actualization,” www.lacan.com/forced.htm.
15
Critchley, On Humor (Thinking in Action), 101–102. See also Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding
(London & New York: Verso, 2007), 83, and Simon Critchley and Carl Cederström, How to Stop
Living and Start Worrying (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 89.
16
This scene takes place in the third film in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban” released in 2004.
122 carol owens
imagine this feared object or figure made ridiculous. The spell is per-
formed on a shapeless hidden form – a “Boggart” – which when released
from its place of containment takes on the form and shape of the child’s
feared object/figure17. Once it is released, the child has to wave his/her
wand in the direction of the Boggart, which by now has assumed – what
we can usefully think of as – the figure of the superego, in the first child’s
case beautifully exemplified in the form of a cruel and sadistic professor,
and whilst conjuring up an additional feature to attach to the original
ferocious form, one that in being judged “riddikulus” by, let us say, the
child’s ego (in this case his granny’s handbag and hat), the child chants
“riddikulus” and all at once the superego relents its inhibiting grip on the
child, and the entire class erupts in laughter.
However, we have to recognize that it’s not guaranteed that finding the
ego’s concerns ridiculous and petty is not also potentially cruel and
sadistic. After all, in Freud’s account, and as Simon Critchley has observed,
humor has the same internal logic as depression. In other words, whereas
the regression to narcissism in melancholia leads to a laceration of the ego,
in humor it leads to its ridicule. We have to bear in mind that finding one’s
self and one’s concerns “ridiculous” when coordinated with melancholia
may well provide grounds for abject despair, if not suicide. Given that it is
the agency of the superego that brings about the pathological dimension in
melancholia and mania, and the non-pathological one in humor – how do
we answer the question of why it is that the superego functions variously in
each of these states, especially as we recognize that it is the superego that
organizes symptoms and causes suffering in the subject?
We will not, it seems, find the answer in Freud, who had maintained
that the superego could be diseased in some cases and others not, though
his almost final word on the matter was that if the superego really is benign
and kindly in its relation to the ego in humor, then “we still have a lot to
learn about the nature of the superego.”18 Critchley takes a more matur-
ational viewpoint; on the one hand he explains that we can think of – what
he calls – “Superego I” as the “lacerating superego that tells you you’re a
useless piece of shit” and on the other, that “Superego II” is a more benign
17
In Celtic and old English myth and folklore there are numerous accounts of the Boggart (Bogart,
Bogeyman, Bogle, Boggle), a household or field spirit occasionally sketched as mischievous,
occasionally as helpful, sometimes though more sinisterly depicted as a child abductor, hence the
cautionary expression to children: beware of the bogeyman! For example: J. Widdowson, “The
Bogeyman: Some Preliminary Observations on Frightening Figures,” Folklore 82.2 (Summer 1971):
99–115.
18
Freud, “On Humor,” 166.
superego.19 And these two versions of the superego correspond to its
infantile and mature forms. In Critchley’s almost evangelical position on
Freud’s 1927 Superego, it is Superego II that “is a mature superego that is
capable of looking at itself from outside of itself and finding itself ridicu-
lous.”20 For Critchley, in fact, Superego II offers to the suffering subject a
cure by humor. For Critchley, indeed, it is humor that brings about the
maturation of superego function that has “salutary effects.” In this move
Critchley appears to reverse the formula proposed by Freud in 1927, i.e.,
that it is through the agency of the superego that humor comes about.
If for Critchley there is cure by humor, for Miller there is cure by
irony.21 For Miller, humor is always already social depending on inscrip-
tion in the perspective of the Other and being heard at/in the place of the
Other. Irony, on the other hand, would in Miller’s account at least, seem
to better approximate Freud’s original example of the subject facing the
gallows and commenting on it being not a bad way to start the week.
Irony, Miller remarks, does not come from the Other: “It is from the
subject, and it goes against the Other. What does irony say? It says that the
Other does not exist, that the social link in its very foundation is a fraud,
that there is no discourse which is not a false pretense, a semblant [. . .].”22
For Critchley, on the other hand, it is humor that reveals the human
condition in its “laughable inauthenticity.”23 If for Critchley humor is the
cure, and for Miller irony is the best model to conceptualize the psycho-
analytic cure, then for Lacan the only cure – strictly speaking – is desire.
Most Lacanians take for granted the idea that desire opposes superego in so
far as superego orders jouissance and is generally speaking not desirable for
the subject, all things considered.24 So, the idea of a “grown up” and
mature superego replacing an immature and childish one is quite
19 20
Critchley and Cederström, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, 90. Ibid.
21
Miller, in fact, opposes the clinic of irony with the clinic of humor in terms of a counterpoint he
establishes between on the one hand psychoanalytic discourse and, on the other, the discourse of the
psychiatric clinic: “While waiting to be cured of psychoanalysis, the wish I shall formulate is that our
clinic be ironic. The choice is a forced choice: either our clinic will be ironic, that is to say, based on
the inexistence of the Other as a defense against the real – or our clinic will be a resucitée of the
psychiatric clinic. The psychiatric clinic is voluntarily humoristic. This clinic often makes fun of the
crazy person, of this poor madman who is outside discourse. But to make fun of the crazy person
only means that one constructs his or her own clinic, based on established discourses.” Jacques-Alain
Miller, “A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic,” (Original title, “La
clinique d’ironie”) trans. and ed. Ellie Ragland and Anne Pulis, The Symptom: Online Journal for
lacan.com 2 (Spring 2002), www.lacan.com/contributionf.htm.
22
Miller, “A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic.”
23
Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 83.
24
Though it should be stated that Miller is much more emphatic on the division of desire and
enjoyment, whereas Soler would say: Jouissance is everywhere!
124 carol owens
debatable. Lacan, and later, Žižek, variously railed against the notion of an
opposition of a good, caring ego-ideal, with a bad, excessively cruel
superego. The Lacanian point much touted by Žižek is that the ego-
ideal that might lead us on a track to moral growth and maturity requires
us to betray the “law of desire” by way of taking on board the “reasonable”
demands of the existing socio-symbolic order.25
Even if it is a particular type of superego, i.e., one that is non-diseased and
mature, that is responsible for the slide from melancholia to humor, or from
any other state of non-humor to humor, this still doesn’t adequately explain
why Freud elevates the superego’s functioning in humor. One thing that
does strike me though is that Freud seemed to need to put a positive
redeeming spin on the superego, something he would go so far as to
designate a “higher nature” in his remarks in “The Ego and the Superego”:
[. . ..] now that we have embarked upon the analysis of the ego we can give
an answer to all those whose moral sense has been shocked and who have
complained that there must surely be a higher nature in man: ‘very true,’ we
can say, ‘and here we have that higher nature, in this ego-ideal or super-ego
[. . ...]26
And perhaps this accounts, at least in part, for the higher nature of the
superego in his paper “On Humor” as it is there that he raises humor to the
dignity of the sublime. Indeed, Alenka Zupančič finds Freud’s line on
humor from 1927 following the same logic as Kant’s logic of the sublime.
She argues that two essential Kantian points may be mapped onto Freud
here: that we can at times be overcome with feeling ourselves insignificant as
far as the world is concerned and that our own concerns – as the touchstone
of our existence – suddenly strike us as trivial and unimportant.27 Experi-
ences of the sublime and humor are in the same register, each involving a
degree of narcissistic satisfaction that results from our consciousness of
being able to elevate ourselves above the everyday and the mundane.
Let us examine now two dreams from a girl who in Freudian terms is
melancholic, who regularly drains herself of humor in both senses of the
term that I have tried to bring out here; she cuts herself and she vomits, a
lot. She brings material to our work together that finds a response in
laughter at times, but for all that she laughs with me, it is not guaranteed
25
(My paraphrasing.) Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality
(London and New York: Verso, 1994).
26
Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. 36.
27
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real Kant and Lacan (London & New York: Verso, 2000), 152.
that this is necessarily transformative of her suffering, especially as, and
even precisely because, she finds herself ridiculous, and quite abject in that.
I’m calling her Annie, after Annie Hall, after Anhedonia of course.
Annie’s dreams
I
I dreamt that I had given you a book which contained the poem by Patrick
Kavanagh – Advent. Somehow I could see the first verse:
We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
I saw it in your hands and yet when the book lay in your hands I saw that
the cover of the book bore the name of another poet: Yeats.
II
I was walking and I was thin enough so I was allowed to enjoy just walking
along. Suddenly I noticed a single crow. And this crow didn’t scare me.
Then all at once there were many. And they were screaming to me: EAT,
EAT, EAT.
And I must have eaten as then I felt just as bad and as fat as normal and
started to drain away into a hole in the ground.
Annie believes herself to be a wicked person, not allowed or entitled to

“have” the things that she considers the dues of a good person. There’s a
tight logic that she has rehearsed for a good many years where she believes
herself to be a “wicked monster” who takes and takes, a “selfish whore”:
eating everything up, using something of value, something good for bad
intention reduces her to an eating, vomiting, cutting, and moralizing
machine. She is not allowed to eat. If she eats, she has to vomit, since
only good people are allowed to eat. And in between all this eating and
vomiting, she is not allowed to “test or taste” in the words of Patrick
Kavanagh from her dream, any of life’s other pleasures: walking, reading,
listening to music, watching a movie or doing anything that is not in some
126 carol owens
way about “getting better,” which of course contains the moral imperative
to transform herself into a “better” self.
In her associations, Annie recalled studying the poem in her last year in
school, a time of great turmoil and distress as she had, in her own moral
reckoning, failed to become a better person and this was when she began
what would be a year-long anorexic fast. Advent is the four-week period in
the Christian calendar leading up to Christmas, and at the time of the
poem’s writing, it was a period of fasting and penance. Annie connected
the testing and tasting in the first line with her overeating and bulimic
feasting, and the fasting of the dry black bread and sugarless tea to her
anorexic three hundred calories a day solution. But she also noted that
there is the reference to the stolen fruit, which for her conjures up so much
of her monstrous and wicked whoring as she describes her bulimia. And
then we come to this enigmatic reference to Yeats. She sees it as “Yeats” –
another great Irish poet – whose name printed on this poetry book
mystifies her in its inaccuracy. It is only when I say it back to her as
Y. . . EATS (WHY EATS?) that she hears her own question.
The second dream is a more recent one and functions perhaps as a
response to this question – Why eat?
The one crow is not threatening, but the many compel her to eat . . .
and die. Around this she speculates that the one crow reminds her of the
crow in the film entitled The Crow. He is a creature come back from the
dead to avenge the murder of his wife. Though vengeful, he is good. And
from this movie she quotes this one crow as saying:
Mother is another name for God on the lips and in the minds of children.
She interprets this as indicating that a child’s belief in her mother is like a
belief in God or Santa Claus . . . you believe they exist and that they know
what’s right for you. But, of course, at some point you stop believing in
Santa, and God. She recalls – to her surprise – that the collective noun for
crows is “a murder” (of crows) and indeed the prevailing theme emerges in
this dream as murder, albeit a self-murder that leads her to the hole in the
ground, which is of course both a grave and a toilet wherein she and all the
contents of her body are drained away.
These dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of superego functioning as it is
variously coordinated with Law, pleasure, and jouissance.28 The delimiting
28
In Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” there is also a dream that is narrated as engendered by excess
consumption and over-abundant amounts of certain humors. The “cure” prescribed by the Cock’s
wife involves a purging of choler and of melancholy.
of a time to eat in the first dream; a time to fast and a time to feast is
encapsulated in the Law of Advent (God’s Law so to speak). It is a
beautiful law for this girl since it allows for a pleasure that is entitled,
not stolen. The poet’s nostalgia attests to this domain of regulated pleasure
and its importance for moral wellbeing broadly understood. We see this
appetite (sic) for a regulated oral pleasure in the new diet trend that
proposes weight loss, good health, and longevity by following a Fast/Feast
regime. Essentially, the dieter eats “normally” for five days a week and
“fasts” for two days.29 Subscribers to this diet proclaim that what is
wonderful about this method is that one can “enjoy” eating unrestrictedly
for those five days because one has had to restrict their eating for the two-
day fast. Do we not already know this as a strictly Lacanian truth: In times
when everything is permitted . . . nothing is permitted? In times when one
must enjoy, one radically fails to do so. Insofar as a question emerges in
Annie’s dream, it testifies to the fact that the beautiful Law – God’s law of
fast and feast – although beautiful doesn’t explain everything. We could
say, the ego ideal, though rational and in keeping with the pleasure
principle, fails as a moral guide. Why eat? Speaking about eating is not
an imperative in our work in the way it has functioned in other places
where she has been interrogated about the way she eats. She knows that if
she speaks about eating with me it is because she brings it up . . . and yes,
“bringing things up” regularly features in her speech.
In the second dream, the one crow functions to deliver a message about
the child’s innocent belief and trust in the mother and in God. And here
we may recall that for Lacan the function of the superego is hatred for
God, the reproach that he has handled things badly. This one crow
specifies the protective as well as the regulatory powers of the Mother
and God, but also, crucially, veils the fact that they have handled things
badly. In failing her, again as moral guides, she is abandoned to the murder
of the crows. Here we see most clearly the obscene underside of the ego
ideal, in this case heard as the super-egoic command: eat eat eat! Unto
death!
Why eat? Because we say so!
You don’t feel that you are allowed to but you must!
In her encounters with the various helping professions, the response to her
question of why she should eat is met with . . . “because you must.”
29
See Michelle Harvie and Tony Howell, The 2-Day Diet: Diet two days a week. Eat the Mediterranean
way for five (London: Vermilion, 2013).
128 carol owens
Afterword
The position that Freud advanced for the superego in his 1927 paper, as
providing the conditions for a yield of pleasure for the subject via the
surprise occurrence of humor, has fostered some interesting claims and
ideas. Critchley’s Superego II – his “amigo” – is a “mature superego
capable of looking at itself from outside of itself and finding itself ridicu-
lous.”30 This view finds purchase in all sorts of places – as I have sketched
in this essay – from Harry Potter and his friends battling “boggarts,” to
cancer treatment wards, through to self-help cognitive behavioral therapy
websites – where you only have to laugh at yourself and your worrying
concerns in order for your fears to be transformed and your humorous
disposition to allow you to endure and survive your current situation.
Returning once again to Freud’s paper, perhaps we can advance the idea
that the truly therapeutic gain obtained by the “humorous attitude” is less
along the lines of laughing at the superego, finding pleasure unexpectedly
through the surprise of laughter, i.e., finding yourself “allowed to enjoy,”
and more along the lines of finding that where there is humor, the
injunction to enjoy – as commanded by superego as the guarantee of
jouissance – is temporarily suspended. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the
analyst’s desire is coordinated with a lack of jouissance, not with superego
(I or II); on the side of desire, what is opened up then is a space and a
discourse where the analysand is allowed not to enjoy. Perhaps this is what
Freud had in mind when he wrote that the humorous attitude is the very
means by which a person “refuses to suffer.”31
Alenka Zupančič has astutely observed that for the subject who does not
know whether what she wants to do is right or wrong, whether it is
pathological or not, such a subject finds in the superego a sort of practical
guide that at least gives her the clue that the best of all possible actions is
always the one that makes her suffer the most.32 What we know as a
Freudian fact is that in melancholia the subject suffers most from loss of
desire and in the melancholic condition of anhedonia the subject suffers
most from the inability to experience pleasure. The subject is simply not-
in-the-humor. When I first presented the material in this chapter at a
conference on Laughter and Psychoanalysis, a colleague sympathetically
remarked that psychoanalysts find it most difficult to work with
melancholia – and we agreed that this is because it is so very difficult to
30
Critchley and Cederström, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, 90.
31 32
S. Freud. Op.cit. p. 163 Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, 163.
mobilize desire in the subject who has discovered a way to exist (albeit
minimally in some cases) that testifies to her worthlessness and degrad-
ation. To give this up in favor of a paltry but essentially life-affirming
desire seems not merely to ask too much but perhaps to ask the impossible.
However, I take for granted that the production of dreams is one function
of the unconscious at work where desire is essentially mobilized in analytic
work – the dreams of the analysand are, after all, little products of desire
for the analyst – and I hope for moments in the work where this renovated
desire creates both the conditions for surprise and the conditioning of that
subtly observed moment of Freud’s: grounds for the refusal to suffer.
WORKS CITED
Afkhami, Amir Arsalan. Encyclopaedia Iranica. 2004. www.iranicaonline.org/
articles/humoralism-1.
Critchley, Simon. On Humor (Thinking in Action). London: Routledge, 2002.
Infinitely Demanding. London & New York: Verso, 2007.
Critchley, Simon and Carl Cederström. How to Stop Living and Start Worrying.
Cambridge: Polity, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14 (1917). 237–258.
“The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19 (1923). 1–66.
“On Humor.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. 1927. 59–166.
Nutton, Vivian. “Humoralism.” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of
Medicine. Vol. 1. Edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Rhianna. “Understanding & Accepting Emotional Detoxification.” Embracing
Health (blog). March 26, 2012, www.embracinghealthblog.com/212/03/26/
understanding-accepting-emotional-detoxification/.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality.
London and New York: Verso, 1994.
Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real Kant and Lacan. London & New York: Verso,
2000.
part ii
Comedy on the couch
chapter 8
Comedy and the agency of the letter in A Midsummer

Night’s Dream
Matthew Sharpe
“Comedy and tragedy are made of the same alphabet.” 1
Bringing Lacan to A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In one of the purer illustrations of what Freud intended by “secondary
revision” in literature, Puck’s beautiful epilogue to the audience in
A Midsummer’s Dream2 begins:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream . . .
(MND, V, i)3
There were good reasons for the Shakespearean author to cover his tracks
in this way, and give the last word in the comedy to “honest” Puck, whose
ludic agency this chapter will turn around. Any play produced in the
Britain of the early 1590s which staged a “fairy queen” sleeping with an
ass might have pressed all the wrong political buttons, particularly if
performed before Her Royal Majesty Gloriana. In any case, Puck’s deft
reframing of “these visions” that comprise A Midsummer Night’s Dream
serves to make of what we have seen its own mise en abyme, and to compare
all we have previously read or seen with the dream-work to which we are all
subject every night as we sleep:
1
Francis Bacon, Promus of Formularies and Elegancies (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: Boston, 1883), #516.
2
Hereafter in text and notes abbreviated as MND. All Shakespeare plays will be referenced by
abbreviations of their titles, followed after a comma by Act number (I–V), and scene number (in
small roman numerals, i–vii).
3
William Shakespeare, Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).
133
134 matthew sharpe
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehend . . .:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(MND, V, i)
If Puck’s epilogue was intended by Shakespeare to “scape the serpent’s
tongue” of critics and censors in a time when dreaming was increasingly
being depicted in humanist works as “nothing else but a bubling scum or
froath of the fancie, which the day hath left undigested,”4 theatre-goers in
the age of psychoanalysis are unlikely to be put off the scent.5 Beyond its
titular occupation with dreaming, MND provides rich fare for Freudian,
psychoanalytic approaches. The play’s action is divided between two
settings which cannot but evoke to post-Freudian readers the divided
psychic world pairing the conscious mind, governed by reason and bound
by social proprieties; and the unconscious, bound only to the illogical logic
of the primary processes and the subject’s tyrannical drives.
On the one hand, opening and closing the play, we have the daylight
kingdom of Theseus’ Athenian court. Herein, according to “the ancient
privilege of Athens” evoked by Hermia’s father Egeus, even the innermost
desires of our young heroes and heroines are subject to paternal, and
Duchal, authority.(MND Act 1.i) Hermia’s free choice of Lysander as her
4
Thomas Nashe, in Filip Krajnik, “In the Shadow of Night: Sleeping and Dreaming and Their
Technical Roles in Shakespearian Drama,” Durham theses, Durham University, http://etheses.dur
.ac.uk/7764/, at 166. The previous century, and a host of dream-plays in the 1590s, had seen
renaissance dramatists increasingly integrate dreams into their dramas. As in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth or Richard III, however, modern dramatists had begun to depict the dreams as less the
vehicles of divine or daemonic inspiration, and more as recognizable plot devices, and as privileged
sources revealing the fears and desires of dramas’ leading characters. See Krajnik, “In the Shadow of
Night,”168–181; Pavel Drábek, “‘My Dreams Presage Too True’: Dreams as Dramatic Device in
Elizabethan Drama,” in Shakespeare Mania: A Festschrift to Honour Professor Andrzej Żurowski on His
70th Birthday, ed. Anna Cetera (Warsaw: WUW, 2013).
5
Sigmund Freud’s great admiration for the bard (whom he oscillated between believing was Francis
Bacon, then Edward de Vere) turned upon Shakespeare’s remarkable psychological acumen.
Everybody knows that Freud recognized in the Shakespeare plays many insights anticipating his
own: most famously concerning the Oedipus complex in Hamlet. See N.M. Holland, “Freud on
Shakespeare,” in PMLA 75.3 (June 1960); N.M. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York,
Toronto, London: McGraw Media Hill Co., 1966); Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1994).
Comedy and the agency in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 135
paramour threatens to bring her either death or consignment to the
nunnery, “to live a barren sister all your life.” (MND Act 1.i)
On the other hand, beyond the city walls, there are the woodlands to
which the lovers Hermia and Lysander steal away by night “intent. . . to be
gone from Athens, where we might, / Without the peril of the Athenian
law.” (MND Act I.1) This is a realm ruled not by Theseus the city-
founding conqueror, subduer and wooer of Hippolyta, Queen of the
Amazons (alongside the half-animal centaurs, archetypal challengers to
patriarchal order). It is the realm of the fairies: according to the folk
traditions Shakespeare drew upon to construct the play: “tutelary spirits
of fertility”6 and embodiments of untamed nature, if not the enchanted-
maternal-feminine over the rational-paternal-masculine.
Presiding over this mirror-world is the dual, far more unstable, authority
of King Oberon and Queen Titania. Their recent stoushes concerning
custody of an oriental “changeling” boy have upset the order of nature
itself. (MND II, i) The woodlands in MND is the realm of darkness and
night, associated in Elizabethan literature as in Freudian psychoanalysis
with the “sleep of reason” and reign of the imagination, free from “Judge
and moderator”: “[i]n time of sleepe, this faculty is free, & many times
conceaves strange, stupend, absurd shapes.”7 Within Shakespeare’s wood-
lands, as in the Freudian unconscious, the ordinary laws governing human
sociability are suspended. A carnivalesque, Bakhtinian festivity prevails.
Lovers change their object-choices due to the workings of love potions
delivered by fairies to the tips of their eyelids. Fairies visible and invisible
have their sport with enchanted mortals. Identities are fluidly exchanged.
Men can be half- (and presumably wholly-) transformed into beasts at
Oberon’s or Titania’s good pleasure. Women can couple with animals.
Nearly nothing is as it seems.8
6
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 137.
7
Burton qtd. in Krajnik, “In the Shadow of Night,” 68.
8
For examples of different Freudian interpretations of MND, both as a whole and in particular
aspects, see Weston A. Gui, “Bottom’s Dream,” American Imago 9 (1952): 251–305; Gerald F.
Jacobsen, “A Note on Midsummer Night’s Dream,” American Imago 19 (1962): 21–26; M.D. Faber,
“Hermia’s Dream: Royal Road to A Midsummer Night ‘s Dream,” Literature and Psychology 22 (1972):
179–190; Norman N. Holland, “Hermia’s Dream,” Annual of Psychoanalysis (1979): 369–389; James
Calderwell, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Anamorphism and Theseus’ Dream Author,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 42.4 (Winter 1991): 409–430; Jan Lawson Hinely, “Expounding the Dream,
Shaping the Fantasies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and
Film, eds. Maurice Charney & Joseph Reppen (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1987), 120–137.
136 matthew sharpe
This chapter wants to bring to the analysis of MND materials drawn
from Jacques Lacan’s post-Freudian understanding of “Titania and Ober-
on’s realm,” the Freudian unconscious, drawing on resources from struc-
turalist linguistics.9 There has up to this time been no dedicated Lacanian
study of the play as a whole: a situation oddly reflecting Lacan’s own
lament in Seminar VII about the “little time” he had been able to give to
comedy in his “return to the meaning of Freud” in the 1950s and 1960s.10
Yet, just as comedy and the Witz were the subject of Freud’s ground-
breaking 1906 study Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, so comedy
emerges in Lacan’s decisive Seminar V: The Formations of the Unconscious.
This seminar represents a key moment in his theoretical evolution. It
involves his reshaping of the Freudian account of the Oedipus complex,
and the evolution of the famous “bottle-opener” graphe du désir. The
literary genre of comedy, Lacan claims in Seminar V, is “linked in the
closest possible way” to what he argues Freud has shown to be the specific
field of psychoanalysis qua “talking cure”: “what can be called the connec-
tion between the self and language.”11 It is a connection of culture and
nature, the real and the symbolic of which the phallus, worn around the
waists of the ancient comic actors, is the signifier: “the privileged signifier of
that mark where the share of the logos is wedded to the advent of desire.”12
Perhaps Lacan’s widest, framing claim concerning comedy is, however,
fired off en passant in Seminar VII. It comes in the context of his lamenting
that he should have liked to have spent more time on comedy than he had
done.13 Even when the phallic appendage of the Greek stage was “whisked
away” in less permissive, less pagan times like those of the bard, comedy is a
cultural form, which, from the start, “outs” the obscene envers of ordinary
social life. Indeed, as in the old comedy of Aristophanes or the ribald banter
of Shakespeare’s fools, it stages many of the repressed wishes, fantasies,
beliefs, dreams, slips, blunders and “formations of the unconscious” that
make up the pas-de-sens upon which Freud founded psychoanalysis.
9
However much MND has invited a host of psychoanalytic explorations, there has up until this time
been, in terms of Lacan interpretations, as far as I can see, only James L. Calderwood,
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Anamorphism and Theseus’ Dream Author,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 42.4 (Winter 1991): 409–430. This paper complements our contribution here, but does
not explore the same structural and linguistic determinants in MND. See Matthew Sharpe,
“Between Genet’s Bordello and Holy Communion: Lacan and Comedy in Seminar V,” S-Journal
6/7 (2014): 61–72.
10
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter and ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller (London: Routledge, 2002), 314.
11 12
Lacan, Seminar V, December 18, 1957, unpublished papers. 13. Lacan, Écrits, 581/692.
13
Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314.
In what follows, taking our direction from this claim, alongside Lacan’s
pregnant suggestions tying comedy to “the connection between the self
and language,” we proffer a Lacanian interpretation of the key action in
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lacan’s claims that the primary
processes of the unconscious14 involve the linguistic or rhetorical tropes of
metaphor and metonymy—not untamed, unworded nature—we will
argue allow us to cast a very specific, linguistic light on the woodland
realm of Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As we have commented, most critics have seen this setting of Acts II–IV
as something like the repressed, mirror underside or “double” of the
Athenian daylight kingdom in the play (Acts I and V), into which our
full-hearted lovers stumble. The bard’s use of fairies and the woodland
setting encourages us to suppose of these nocturnal Athenian woods, also,
what most readers of Freud have surmised about the unconscious: that it is
a kind of repository of subjects’ pre-cultural, wholly natural drives, bliss-
fully freed of the repressive binds of culture and law. Yet, what MND’s
comedy instead makes clear, we will instead argue, is that what readers
should learn in this new “academy”15 is how the unconscious actually
works incredibly artfully. It is less nature freed from culture as a “culture”
unbound from normative and linguistic Law. It is a culture upside-down
in which the kinds of things our comedy tellingly calls “translations” of
lovers’ identities, masks and méconnaissances are the order of the night’s
oneiric revels. The sprite Puck’s impish games in the “midsummer night’s
dream” of the lovers, we will claim, give poetic-imaginative figure to the
highly “unnatural” primary processes that allow the unconscious each
night to uncouple the day’s residues from their rational meanings (in the
operation of metonymy), and realign them “metaphorically” according to
its own good measure and pleasure.
The dearth of Lacanian readings of the Shakespearian comedy is the more
surprising as there is much within its text that seem to point to the particular
relevance of a Lacanian approach to MND, stressing the role of language or
the “agency of the letter” in it. On any reasonably insightful assessment of
the play, that is to say, it is clear that one of the things the author himself
wanted his audiences to do as they watched MND—as Puck’s epilogue
explicitly asks—is to stand back from, and reflect upon the diegetic action.
We are severally prompted by the playwright to reflect on the kinship of the
14
See Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 159–215.
15
Plato’s academy was in woodlands just outside Athens’ city walls.
138 matthew sharpe
comedy itself, and dramatic theatre more widely, with the “linguisterie” or
“airy nothing” of the theatre’s dream-work. As well as being a “first order”
Elizabethan “romcom,” then, MND is a highly self-reflective “play about
theatrical plays.” It stages its own reflection on “how they do it,” as it were,
and how we as audiences can be taken into the dream-like diegetics.16 And
neither is the specific place and power of language in this oneiric art – the
decisive stake of Lacan’s rereading of Freud in the 1950s – ever far from the
explicit, self-reflective surface of MND.
Most obviously, in his midsummer night’s enchantment, the character
introduced to us as Nick “Bottom” (just “Bottom” to his friends) is turned
from his shoulders upwards into the very “ass” that his own proper name
suggests, together with his overblown, lusty egotism.17 “Bottom”’s fate in
MND is thus comically comparable to that imagined by the psychotic
analysand Freud describes who suffered from the delusion that, not only
could she not metaphorically “see eye to eye” with her lover, but that he
had literally, physically “twisted her eyes.” Bottom too becomes a living
“figure of speech,” a metaphor made man.18
The names of the four “mechanicals” also seem deliberately contrived by
the Shakespeare author to point to the importance of language in shaping
our identity. Each of these “mechanicals” has not metaphorical, but
metonymic names. They are nominated as either of parts of the body
16
The whole of Act V takes place after the offstage weddings of all the main couples. It places we in the
audience alongside the diegetic newly-weds to watch the mechanicals “Quince,” “Snug,” “Bottom”
et al.’s completely artless “play within the play.” We are thereby asked as spectators (as Theseus and
Hippolyta within the play ask) whether we can be moved by their spectacle, and if so how or why,
given the boffins’ incompetencies in playing out the:
. . . tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; [a] very tragical mirth.’
Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
(MND Act V.i)
17
When we first meet him at the opening of Act II, Bottom wants to play the figures of a tyrant and a
lion, highly narcissistically eroticised figures.
18
“She could not understand him at all, he looked different every time . . .; he had twisted her eyes,
now they were not her eyes any more, now she saw herself through different eyes” (Sigmund Freud,
“The Unconscious,” SE XIV, 197–198) Jungian and esoteric readings of the play have made much of
the names of “Helena” (light) and her rightful, if errant spouse “Demetrius” (earth). Source readings
have highlighted the way the play’s choices of “Helena,” “Theseus,” and “Hippolyta” as names from
classical poetry mean that MND at once evokes, and then plays with, the entire mythoi or “chains of
signification” these names would have connoted for the bard’s educated audience. See Maguire,
Laurie, Shakespeare’s Names (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 3, “The
Mythological Name, Helena”; for a Jungian reading: Katherine Bartol Peraut, Astronomy, Alchemy,
and Archetypes: An Integrated View of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, www.cgjungpage
.org/learn/articles/literature/709-a-midsummer-nights-dream-astronomy-alchemy-and-archetypes.
(“Bottom,” “Snout”); or else parts of the profession they practice (Francis
“Flute” for the bellows-mender; “Snug,” naming the goal of this joiner’s
art; or “Quince” from “quines” or “quoins,” the wooden wedges used by
carpenters like Quince).19 Meanwhile, the woodland fairies, who play a
similarly subordinate but vital background role in the comedy, have
“natural kind terms” for names: “Peaseblossum,” “Cobweb,” “Mustard
Seed,” and “Moth.”
It is as if, with these “improper names” for MND’s background cast,
Shakespeare wanted to foreground the “mechanical,” linguistic dimension
to the play itself, or the comically-mechanical dimension to love and its
displacements of our identities. For, as Alenka Zupančič has discerned in
The Odd One In, there is something about comedies like MND – in
contrast to their tragic cousins, named most often after the heroes or
heroines (Antigone, Oedipus the King, Agamemnon, Othello, Hamlet . . .) –
which makes it appropriate to give them such generic “natural kind”
names as MND’s fairies take: The Miser, The Jealous Husband, The Taming
of the Shrew, etc. This convention, as Zupančič allows us to see it, reflects
how the characters presented in comedies like MND, even in the main
action, are not what we could call fully developed, psychologically well-
rounded subjects. In MND, for instance, we get to know precious little
about Hermia and Helena, Lysander, Demetrius and the rest of
the dramatis personae except what concerns their erotic affairs, on which
more presently. Indeed, each of these “main characters” is completely one-
dimensional. They are effectively presented to us as the hapless bearers of a
single, defining “unary trait”: namely, that they are “young people . . .
rather dim-witted,” in “dreamy love,” whether with Demetrius (in Hele-
na’s case) or Lysander (in Hermia’s), or with either girl at different times
(Lysander, Demetrius). They can and do talk about little else before they
disappear from the scene.20
19
Then there is the pained search of first Helena, then Hermia, for that single trait of the other (eyes,
height . . .) that has magically attracted both Lysander and Demetrius. It may not exactly be (but it
also may be) each’s “bottom” that has caught the men’s eye: but the girls’ suppositions that it must
be the others’ eyes (see below) or her height – viz. part objects – that have somehow caused the
men’s eros again points up the power language gives us, in the rhetorical tropes of metonymy and
synecdoche, to separate parts from the wholes to which they belong, in order to designate the latter
by the former. Helena or Hermia supposing Demetrius moved to love the other by her “eyes” alone
is, albeit more erotically, the same kind of operation as when subjects name the King “the crown,” a
sailing ship a “sail,” an office worker by his (or her) “white collar,” etc. On why eyes play such a role,
see “Concluding remarks.”
20
Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Short Circuits) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2009), 37–38, 65–66, 176–177: “on this level comedy is purely stereotypical: it puts aside all
140 matthew sharpe
Reading MND via Lacan, we will thus try to show in the chapter, allows
us very clearly to see what Lacan called, in a famous essay, the “agency of
the letter” at play in the Shakespeare comedy. It will also allow us to
highlight how this much-loved play, like comedy more widely, stages
characters’ “inmixing” in language in ways that amusingly challenge our
daytime, egoistic sense of being our own masters—and many of our post-
romantic illusions about the sublimity of romantic love.
“Love in idleness”and the midsummer night’s dreamers’

structural dance
“O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.”
(MND I, i)
Critics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have noted the way that the
identity-shifts of the characters in Acts I–IV, and especially of the young
women Hermia and Helena, resemble a graceful dance, in which the roles
stay constant, but each person occupies different roles in turn.21 It is this
structural feature of the play that above all marks it off, from a Lacanian
perspective, as reflecting what Lacan in the 1950s called “the agency of the
letter” in structuring human desire and social affairs.
In MND, as we learn in Act I, before the play’s beginnings, there has
already been a first amorous transformation or “change of hearts.” The
young man Demetrius, previously Helena’s suitor, has been won over by
Helena’s best friend Hermia. He is Hermia’s suitor, moreover, who is now
favored by her father, Egeus, over Demetrius’ friend-come-rival Lysander,
despite Hermia’s ardent affection for the latter. (MND I, i) Helena, under-
standably miffed by her friend’s filching of her beloved, expresses in the
opening scenes her ardent desire to “change places” with Helena: in language,
subtleties of a situation or character, ignoring their psychological depths and motives, reducing
them to a few ‘unary traits’ . . . In a comedy like The Miser, for instance, we learn nothing about the
miserliness: the play does not make this phenomenon any more comprehensive: rather, it depicts it
with an intensifying crassness, producing it in the form of a singular trait . . .” Here, then, we are
disagreeing with readings like those of Garber, which see a deep evolution in the characters of the
main four lovers: “Hermia’s experience in the woods, however, is a first step toward a heightened
awareness . . .,” at Garber, Dream in Shakespeare, 74. On the contrary, it is hard to see how she can
have developed much as a human being from magically losing, then just as unaccountably,
regaining Lysander’s affection, except to scorn men’s constancy as a wholly fickle thing.
21
Enid Welsford, “The Masque Transmuted,” in The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship
between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 324–349; Alan
Brissenden, “The Comedies, I,” in Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1981), 34–48.
incidentally, which beautifully expresses what Lacanians would call her
imaginary, envious identification with her rival, swinging between love and
hate (see “Concluding remarks” in this chapter):
HELENA (to Hermia) Call you me fair? that fair again unsay.
Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!
. . . O, were favour so,
Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go;
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody.
. . . O, teach me how you look, and with what art
You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart . . .
(MND I, i)
Readers will then know how the comedy’s strange play transpires.
After the illicit lovers Lysander and Hermia elope into the woods by
night, they are chased: Hermia by Demetrius, and Demetrius by the
scorned Helena. As things transpire, however, the fairy King Oberon
comes across Helena pathetically chasing after Demetrius, and the
monarch is moved by compassion for the lovesick girl. As a result,
Oberon charges his impish spirit Puck to deliver a love potion to
Demetrius. The potion, when he wakes, will make him fall madly in
love with the first creature he beholds. The potion, we are told, is
drawn from “a little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple
with love’s wound, / And maidens call it love-in-idleness.” The flower
was struck by one of Cupid’s arrows as it fell after missing its virginal
target (in what some readers have seen as the playwright’s veiled
reference to Queen Elizabeth’s famed, disputed chastity). In any case,
Puck delivers the love potion, as he thinks, to Demetrius, fulfilling his
duty to his King.
But here chance or tychē intervenes. For Puck does not chance upon
Demetrius in the forest. He happens upon Lysander who is also
wandering in the woods after Hermia. So it is to Lysander, not Deme-
trius, that Puck gives the “love in idleness” potion. And at this moment,
the oneiric comedy begins in earnest. For when Lysander wakes, the first
creature he beholds is not Hermia. It is her hapless rival Helena. The
result is amusing for us. But Helena is understandably put out when
Lysander almost literally “jumps her,” after having not previously cared
for her erotically one day of his previous life:
lysander: [Awaking] And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake.
Transparent Helena! Nature shows art,
That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart . . .
142 matthew sharpe
helena . . . Lord, what though?
Yet Hermia still loves you: then be content.
lysander Content with Hermia! No; I do repent
The tedious minutes I with her have spent.
Not Hermia but Helena I love:
Who will not change a raven for a dove? . . . (MND, II, ii)
Observing the comedy this creates, and moved by an impish whim to sport
with these “fool . . . mortals,” Puck does not set about trying to rectify his
error. Rather, next, he places the same “love-in-idleness” on Demetrius’, as
on Lysander’s, eyes. (MND, III, ii) The doubly-comic result of Puck’s
agency is then that, in effect, in Act II Helena gets exactly what she thought
she wanted, when in the opening Act she had asked to change places with
Hermia. For, as a result of Puck’s interventions, “two at once woo one; /
That must needs be sport alone.”
It is just that this time it is not Hermia over whom the boys ardently
quarrel. (MND III, ii) It is Helena. She now is forced to fend off first
Lysander, whose sudden lust for her she takes to be the product of derisory
scorn; and secondly the newly enchanted Demetrius, in whose equally
suddenly re-won affection she likewise cannot believe. Hermia, by the
same tokens, goes from the woman chased by all the men to being beloved
of none, through no intervention or action of her own. Underscoring this
effective “translation” of Helena into Hermia, relative to the boys’ loves,
Shakespeare has Hermia in Act III undertake the same kind of anguished
searching to see what her rival, Helena, could have that she does not : a
mirroring scenario to that of Helena in Act 1.22
If the reader has followed me this far (and recalls the play), she will grant
that, whether dance or no, it is not difficult to see what Lacan would call a
kind of symbolic structuration operating in the bard’s comic dream-play.
The same intersubjective structure, pictured in 8.1 below, repeats itself
22
Absent knowledge of Puck and his potion, Hermia hits on nothing more elevated than Helena’s
height as the cause of the boys’ desire. This can be read as a stunningly ironic comment on just how
contingent a thing eros seems to have become in this comedy. In Act I, in the famous exchange with
Lysander about “the course of true love” and why it “ne’er run smooth,” Hermia had proclaimed:
“O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.” (MND I, i) This describes exactly Lysander and
Demetrius’ present fate, in their enchanted lust for Helena; it also reflects the mirroring love-
choices she has made with her friend, and throws a darker light on their childhood inseparability,
initially celebrated by Helena: “We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, / Have with our needles created
both one flower, / Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, / Both warbling of one song, both
in one key, / As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, / Had been incorporate. So we grow
together, / Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition; / Two lovely
berries molded on one stem; / So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart . . .:” (MND III, ii) See
“Concluding remarks” on the status of romantic love in comedy and psychoanalysis.
Figure 8.1: Structure and play in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Acts I–IV
blindly. The lovers, lost in their imaginary rivalries, but change their places
within it. The whole comedy might indeed be argued to turn around the
same kind of structural wiederholung Lacan analysed as shaping the princi-
pal, successive scenes of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous Purloined Letter story.
In Act V, as we know, all becomes well and ends well, due to the
normalizing interventions of the play’s two, daytime and nocturnal,
fathers, to whose agency we will also return. First, King Oberon directs
Puck to end the nocturnal sport and re-enchant the lovers. Obeying his
King, Puck now re-couples Lysander and Hermia, the rightful pair of star-
crossed lovers. He also reopens Demetrius’ bedazzled eyes to Helena’s
charms. Then, once the lovers are all reacquainted with their rightful loves,
wiping sleep from their eyes, Duke Theseus overrides Egeus’ will and
allows the two “pairs of faithful lovers [to] be / Wedded . . . all in jollity”
(MND IV, i). This transpires the following day.
The new social bond created by these normalizing interventions in Act
IV can be pictured, as in the following figure 8.2. Everyone now has been
coupled up with their uncontested “other half.” No one remains
uncoupled and alone. A happy set of symmetries replaces the “out of
joint” structure of the midsummer night’s dream of the middle Acts, as
well as the erotic unhappinesses that preceded it:
144 matthew sharpe
Figure 8.2: “All’s well that ends well”: nuptials, symmetries and reconciliations
From metonymy (Puck) to the paternal metaphor (Oberon/

Theseus): The midsummer night’s dreamwork
The most telling feature of MND attesting to the bard’s acute awareness of
the “instance of the letter” in shaping comedy and love comes in his direct
description of several of the metamorphoses in his play.23 Three times,
characters describe these metamorphoses as “translations.” In the midst of
Helena’s lament concerning Hermia’s winning of Demetrius in Act I, she
muses that:
Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I’d give to be to you translated.
(MND I, i)
When Bottom is transfigured at Puck’s good pleasure into the man with
the head of an “ass,” Quince declares also that he “has been transla-
ted.”(MND III, i) Puck soon after, boasting about his sport with Bottom
and the (understandably terrified) mechanicals to King Oberon, under-
scores that:
I led them on in this distracted fear,
And left sweet Pyramus [Bottom] translated there:
When in that moment, so it came to pass,
Titania waked and straightway loved an ass.
(MND III, ii [italics ours])
The term “translation” in Elizabethan as in modern English carried a

specifically linguistic sense (translatio in the Latin renders our “metaphor”).
23
One of MND’s principal sources, alongside Apuleius’ Golden Ass, was Ovid’s poetic cataloguing of
the metamorphoses undertaken by gods, or visited by them upon mortals in the Metamorphoses. See
Ioannis Ziogas, Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); on Shakespeare’s debt to Ovid, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods
Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1986) and Charles & Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (London:
Routledge, 1990).
It describes the reparsing of an original text in a foreign tongue. Why then, we
may ask, would the poet use it to describe “Robin Goodfellow” (Puck’s other
mantra)’s magic, let alone the envious musings of lovelorn Helena? The term
seems there to highlight for us the way that these characters, their identities
and their erotes are “things of language,” or subject at a much deeper level than
we might imagine to the vicissitudes of linguistic agency and social place.
Metonymy
Gilbert D. Chaitin’s Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan includes arguably one
of the best exegeses of Lacan’s difficult, paradigmatic essay on “The Agency
of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” Chaitin draws
on the tradition of classical rhetoric within which Shakespeare is situated,
and to which he argues Lacan remained indebted.24 It accordingly provides
us with resources to see exactly what might be involved in the “transla-
tions” around which MND’s dream-work turns. We will then be able to
gauge more exactly how MND is “linked in the closest possible way to
what can be called the connection between the self and language,” as Lacan
had claimed of comedy per se.25
Unlike other commentators, Chaitin argues for a priority of metonymy
(or synecdoche) over metaphor in Lacan’s conception of the “agency” of
language in our psychic lives. He argues that Lacan ontologically prioritises
those figures of speech whereby (as in the “mechanicals” names in MND)
a part names a whole. This rhetorical figure of part-for-whole, famously,
Lacan associated with Freudian displacement.
So what is decisive about this power of metonymy (allowing us, for
instance, to call a King his “crown,” or an office worker a “white collar”)
for Lacan? As Chaitin persuasively reads him, metonymy in Lacan’s perspec-
tive highlights what is for him the basic ability of language per se: that of
replacing objects by signifiers, things by their designating words. In meto-
nymic figures of speech, after all, language allows us analytically “cut”
linguistic subjects (the things we wish to designate, like the King) from their
own attributes or predicates in ways that are physically impossible, at the level
of phenomenal reality. So we can “isolate” the brownness from the tree
trunk, to make it the focus of our attention; as we can “cut” the trunk from
the tree, if it is that we wish to discuss; or differently, we can lift the shirt
24
See Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Macmillan: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); Russ
McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
25
Lacan, Seminar V, 13.
146 matthew sharpe
from the man wearing it to make it the subject of our discourse . . . In
metonymy, we then designate the subject by its own uncoupled “predicates,”
to use pre-structuralist terminology. More strangely, as if by the same kind of
Puckian magic that sees the sprite redirect subjects’ loves from person to
person in MND, we can even designate real things by properties their actual
referents may not always have. We can for instance talk meaningfully of an
office worker as “a white collar worker,” when he sports a multi-colored
wardrobe. Or we can continue to call the King “the crown” when he rarely
wears the emblematic headpiece, especially in this day and age.
In other words, metonymy for Lacan bespeaks the distinct power of
language per se, over any comparable natural process in the physical, pre-
signifying world. This is the power to in effect “cut” signifiers from their
referents or their proper, denotative significations. Lacan sometimes
dramatizes the point, borrowing a phrase from Hegel, by saying that
“the word is the murder of the thing.” Our ability to speak of things
metonymically, and to speak of absent or fictional things like the
proverbial “elephant in the room,” is predicated on a prior symbolic
“mortification” of things. This mortification is what allows the objects to
be re-presented by signifiers in our discourse and deliberations, and allows
these discourses to assume a much greater effect in shaping our lives and
desires than we usually imagine.
In one of Lacan’s central thoughts, Lacan claims that this “cut” of words
from their referents that metonymy involves replicates the same “cut”
stabilized for the subject at the resolution of the Oedipus complex by the
child’s identification with the name-of-the-father, and the prohibition of
incestuous union with the mother. To need to speak is to have always already
lost the primordial, maternal Ding: that summum bonum which, at least in
fantasy, would have sated all our demands. But (here’s the rub) to the extent
that we then need to speak in order to try to fulfil our postlapsarian desires,
these desires—and indeed our wider identities—become subject to the
transformational workings and wiederholung of the symbolic order, like
those we saw in Part II operating in MND. Indeed, in Shakespeare’s play’s
terms, it is insofar as we are linguistic, named subjects that we can be
“translated,” misrecognized or mistaken for somebody else: mistaken iden-
tities being the subject of so many comedies like Hitchcock’s North by
Northwest, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as well as our play, MND.
It is then not without cause that Puck himself should advertise his
credentials as a shape-shifting, Protean sprite in a play called A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Puck is, from a Lacanian perspective, the personification of the
unconscious primary processes that go to work each night in our unconscious
Figure 8.3: The ‘Puckian’ primary processes in MND, detaching and replacing subjects’
proper significations
minds in the dream work. This “Puck” is metonymy and metaphor made
comically manifest, or given poetic, dramatic body:
Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.
(MND III.i)
However all of his identity-translating antics, like all the poetic oper-
ations of the unconscious, are predicated on the linguistic operation
underlying the operation of metonymy. Puck, the agency of the letter
personified, lifts and replaces the defining traits or “predicates” from each
of the subjects. From Helena he cuts her hapless initial state of being
“beloved by no one.” Then, by way of his potion, he foists this unhappy
state onto Hermia. Vice-versa (or mutatis mutandis) Helena now becomes
“beloved of both Demetrius and Lysander” as Hermia had been. From a
real Ass, he cuts free the beast’s ears and head to place them on top of the
rightly-named “Bottom.” Meanwhile, his “love in idleness” displaces the
boys’ initial erotic choices (for Hermia), “translating” them into the
desire of Helena.
148 matthew sharpe
Puck could undertake none of these actions, the Lacanian argument would
be, if these parts were not – as in the universe of the signifier – separable from
their natural owners. But this is a state of affairs that, outside of magic, can
apply only given language’s representational redoubling of things with words:
a redoubling which metonymy inaugurates. As Lacan underlines, “meton-
ymy exists from the beginning and makes metaphor possible.”26
Metaphor, restoring sense to floating signifiers

But Puck serves King Oberon even in this woodland dream-realm, how-
ever errantly. Likewise, in Lacanian theory, metonymy is finally subordin-
ate to metaphor (or Freudian condensation). This is true at least in the
important sense that, for Lacan, metaphor is closely associated with
the sense-stabilizing role in language: just as metonymy is associated with
the elementary linguistic action of cutting signifiers from any pregiven
signifieds, in the ways we have stressed.
Chaitlin indeed stresses how metaphor for Lacan is closely associated
with the elementary logical function of the copula, which serves to re-bind
subjects to their predicates: “the crown is displeased with Puck’s error,”
“Helena is now as scornful of Demetrius as Demetrius was of Helena,” etc.
What singles metaphor out from more direct modes of denotation, of
course, is that it involves the replacement of one signifier by another, the
“figure of speech,” just as Puck’s potion in MND replaces one lover by
another. Thereby, metaphors bind linguistic subjects to predicates with
which they are not usually associated. In this way, surprising poetic effects
of sense are engendered, like those that bamboozle Helena and Hermia in
Acts II–III of MND.
Lacan in the Écrits uses a particular metaphor from Victor Hugo to
illustrate this conception of metaphor. The metaphor in questions serves to
underscore the patriarch Boaz’s generosity, in ways touching almost dir-
ectly on the paternal, regenerative function: “His sheaf was neither miserly
nor spiteful.”
Indeed, according to Lacan, the earliest, underlying basis of the possi-
bility of a more or less stable, normative sense of the world for any subject
is a founding, paternal metaphor. The “name of the father,” as Lacan
understand it, instates the law of culture (founded on prohibition of incest)
in place of the desire of the mother in the subject’s psychic structure:
26
Lacan, Seminar III, 227.
Figure 8.4: Hugo’s sheaf metaphor27
(a)
(b)
Figure 8.5: The paternal metaphor or “name of the father”
And so it is appropriate that in MND, it is the combined work of the

play’s two paternal Lords, King Oberon then Duke Theseus, that work to
realign or “copulate” everyone who ought rightly or lawfully to be so
wedded and bedded. The daytime Duke then presides with his wife-to-
be Hippolyta over the nuptials of Hermia and Lysander, Helena and
Demetrius: “three and three” at “a feast in great solemnity.” (MND IV, i)
27
In this metaphor, the signifier “sheaf” replaces “Boaz’s character” (on the left). The important thing
for Lacan is what results on the right-hand side of the matheme. In what the poem explicitly says,
the signifier “sheaf” is metaphorically coupled, via the copula, to predicates (“neither spiteful nor
miserly”) with which a biological sheaf of wheat or barley etc. has no business. Beneath the bar,
though, by way of this new metaphoric coupling, Boaz’s character is supplied with an entirely new,
unstated series of significations (those belonging “by nature” to a sheaf). This last effect of tying the
metaphorized thought (Boaz’s character) to the series of unstated predicates, which now begin to
resonate in readers’ minds, provides the poetic spark or “magic” of the metaphor.
150 matthew sharpe
The association of the two regal or paternal figures Oberon and Theseus
in the play is clear. Shakespeare has in fact gone to some pains to suggest the
functional parallel of the two monarchs. In the opening scene of Act II, after
the nocturnal Queen Titania has announced that she has “foresworn his bed
and company” (MND II, i), she accuses King Oberon of being, like
Theseus, in love with “the bouncing Amazon” Hippolyta. He for his part
accuses her of being in love with Duke Theseus. (MND II, i)
In any event, prompted by Oberon, Puck now obeys the Fairy Lord’s
paternal edict, and promises to operate no more comic translations and hi-
jinx.28 Having metonymically cut their “proper” traits from each of the main
characters in Act II and then “metaphorically” bound them to unnatural
erotic objects in the middle Acts’ dreamwork, Puck now re-places everything
where it ought properly to be. As we have seen, Lysander returns to being
Hermia’s lover (whom no one had loved in the midsummer night’s dream-
ing), while Demetrius wakes to magically realize he has loved Helena all
along. Last but not least, with Oberon revenged on his Queen, Nick
Bottom’s all-too-human visage again takes its proper place on his human
shoulders, ousting his magically acquired ass’s head, at the same time as he
falls from the highest place in Queen Titania’s enchanted affections.
To Theseus, the daytime Lord of Athens, it is left in Act V to sanctify
de jure what Oberon has already de facto put to rights.
Concluding remarks: On love, psychoanalysis and comedy

This chapter, like Midsummer Night’s Dream, has sought to bring together
two disparate worlds: that of Shakespeare’s marvelous comedy and some of
the more mysterious elements of Lacanian theory. We have tried to show
that, from a Lacanian perspective, the magical, identity-bending agency of
Puck and Oberon in the forest indeed echoes what Freud dubs the
“dream-work.” But using Lacan, we formalized Puck’s key “translations”
as involving forms of metaphorization (reassigning subjects to different
significations, and desires, than their own). Such metaphorical translations,
we showed, presuppose the metonymic operation of “cutting” linguistic
subjects from their predicates—Puck’s basic stock in trade, armed with his
magical potions and compulsive sense of mischief.
28
Oberon is clear that Puck must do this quickly, preferably under cover of the night, “yet ere day,”
although the “Fairy lord” tells us that he is not solely a night-time spirit, any more (we might add)
than the unconscious itself ceases doubling the secondary processes in our waking lives, emerging in
symptomatic moments. (MND III, ii)
Reading MND via recourse to Lacan’s conception of the agency of the
signifier, in this way, suggests that comedy is what transpires between the
initial, possibilizing metonymic “cut” of the characters from their proper
places (in this play, what occurs when the lovers and mechanicals enter the
nocturnal realm of the Athenian woods); and the metaphoric putting of
things to rights, presided over by the symbolic Law, and often enough
ending with nuptials or the altar. Comedy, we might say, is something that
happens “when father is away” or sleeping: just as dreams are what we
experience after the preconscious censorship of our own illicit desires and
modes of thinking sleeps. Like our nightly dreams, comedies’ antics are
predicated on the ordinary order of things having been suspended. People
can and do then lose their way, are mistaken by others or else mistake
themselves, “choose love by another’s eyes” (MND I, i), “slip up and fall in
the soup.”29 The whole business is often painful for them, as Helena’s
woes in MND empathetically show. But it is enjoyable for us in the
audience, safely this side of the “fourth wall.”
There can be no question of any critical essay on a play as rich as MND
exhausting its divergent registers, let alone doing justice to the manifold
mysteries of the poet’s craft. We have aimed here, via Lacan, at highlight-
ing the distinctly linguistic and structural elements of the comedy, which
have been neglected by other, even other psychoanalytic, approaches.
Reading MND via Lacan’s structuralist theory allows us to show the extent
to which MND seems intended by the bard as an exercise in putting comic
theatre’s mechanisms themselves on stage, as well as being the hilarious
romp its first four Acts are. If we were asked, nevertheless, to suggest what
our Lacanian reading of MND implies concerning the open or exoteric
subject of the play – namely erotic love – it has to be said that Shake-
speare’s comedy does not seem intended to flatter the sentimentally
inclined. Lacan puts what is at stake here well, when he reflects in Seminar
V that:
Love, this is the point at which the summit of classical comedy is situated.
There is love here, and it is very curious to see the degree to which we no
longer perceive it except through all sorts of partitions that stifle it, romantic
partitions. Love is an essentially comic motive . . .30
One thing for us in any event is clear: erotic love in MND is shown, again
and again, to be a completely imaginary affair (in the Lacanian sense of
“imaginary”): viz. a kind of enchantment enjoyed at the price of blindness
to the deeper determinants of our own psyches, and the risk of being
29 30
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314. Lacan, Seminar V, 17.
152 matthew sharpe
hopelessly caught up in the envious intrigues of rival suitors. Helena is
revealingly close to the mark, then, when she hits upon Hermia’s eyes as
the possible cause of Demetrius’ desire; just as Hermia is right to lunge at
her eyes specifically once she has been cuckolded by her friend.31 The
power of Puck’s “love-in-idleness” potion also operates very specifically in
the comedy through the eyes32: something we know cannot be thoughtless,
since in Hamlet the bard stipulates that Claudius’ poison was delivered
through the ears. Certainly, vision is that sense most closely associated in
Lacanian thought with imaginary identification and the ego, completely
closed to the symbolic determinants of the unconscious; just as it seems to
have been associated by Shakespeare and his contemporaries with love
itself, and its forms of blindness or madness.33
Looking back at Shakespeare through what Lacan calls the “romantic
partitions” of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the magnificent hymns to
love the bard penned in the wooing scenes of Romeo and Juliet, we can
forget not simply the larger tragedy of that play (brought about in no
small measure by Romeo’s impetuosity). We also mistake how often love
is, just as Lacan suggests, the principal subject of the bard’s comedies,
many of which make endless play with how “[l]ove is blind, and lovers
cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit” (Mer. of Ven., II.
vi) or how “reason and love keep little company now-a-days,” as Puck
delightfully understates things in our play. (MND, III, i) The lovers at
any given moment in MND feel the love they feel whole-heartedly, as the
truest expression of their deepest selves. Yet the play shows them, in their
every erotic whim, to be little more than marionettes hung from the
31
MND I.i: Helena in fact nominates eyes and voice as what explains Hermia’s attractions: “Call you
me fair?
That fair again unsay/. Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!/ Your eyes are lodestars; and your
tongue’s sweet air . . .” Compare III.ii: “HERMIA: And are you grown so high in his esteem; /
Because I am so dwarfish and so low? How low am I, thou painted maypole? speak; /How low am I?
I am not yet so low / But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes . . .” (MND III, iii)
32
“The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid / Will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next
live creature that it sees.” (MND II.i)
33
Compare love “engendered in the eyes, with gazing fed,” in Merchant of Venice, III. ii. 67. This
connection between love and the gaze again seems to be a common Elizabethan notion, which
Shakespeare shares with several of his contemporaries. See Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, #944; “Of Love”:
“. . . as if man, made for the contemplation of heaven, and all noble objects, should do nothing but
kneel before a little idol, and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of
the eye; which was given him for higher purposes . . .”; also “Of Envy,” again coupling erotic desire
and envy: “There be none of the affections, which have been noted to fascinate or bewitch, but love
and envy. They both have vehement wishes; they frame themselves readily into imaginations and
suggestions; and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the present of the objects . . .” The
connection of love and envy with sight, after Freud, suggests the narcissistic element in each of these
bewitching affections; and after Lacan, their egoistic, imaginary constitution.
strings of unconscious determinants of their desire. As we have argued,
these unconscious determinants seem to us to be given delightful poetic
body through Puck and his antics in service of the woodland King.
The reader can be reminded, indeed, looking at MND of the long
classical tradition, long predating Shakespeare, devaluing romantic love.
It is this tradition which Freud evokes in Civilization and Its Discontents,
when he comments that “the wise men of all ages have. . .warned us
emphatically against” seeking happiness through romantic love, since by
doing so a person:
. . . becomes to a very dangerous degree dependent on a part of the outer
world, namely, on his chosen love-object, and this exposes him to most
painful sufferings if he is rejected by it or loses it through death or
defection.34
Psychoanalysis was itself engendered at the moment when, in the case of
Anna O., Breuer and Freud were surprised by psychoanalysis’ own comedy:
a form of love born from nothing more substantial than the “translation” of
an analysand into a clinical relationship with an analyst – and then the
transferential “translation” of said analysands’ earlier amorous experiences
and aspirations onto their clinician, about whom they know next to nothing
except that he seems qualified and willing to listen.35 Freud and after him
Lacan were all-too-aware of what MND also suggests: that beneath all the
imaginary, poetic veils and jewels with which we adorn “our Venus,”36 there
34
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (Chrysoma Associates Limited
Publications Division Electronic Books Library, 2000–2005), 20.
35
See Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference Love,” SE XII: 157– 171.
36
See Lucretius, Nature of Things, “. . . men, for the most part, proceed from blind desire and give
women delightful attributes which are not really theirs. And so we see those who are in many ways
misshapen and repulsive are dearly loved and thrive in utmost favor. And some people laugh at
others and urge them, since they are trapped in foul sexual passion, to placate Venus, and yet often
those people, the poor fools, do not think of their own tribulations, which are excessive. A dark
woman is ‘honey colored,’ . . . one who has gray eyes is ‘small Athena,’ a sinewy one who looks like
wooden sticks is ‘a gazelle,’ a squat, dwarfish girl ‘one of the Graces,’ . . . if a fiery, hateful gossip, she
becomes ‘a flaming torch.’ If she is so skinny she can hardly stay alive, she becomes ‘a slender
darling,’ if about to die from coughing fits, then she is ‘delicate.’ A fat bosomy one is ‘Ceres herself
after giving birth to Bacchus,’ a snub-nosed girl ‘a female Silenus or a Satyr woman,’” etc. Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things, trans. Ian Johnson (Arlington, Virginia: Richer Resources Publications,
2010), Book IV, lines 1646–1678. See also Martha Nussbaum, “Beyond Obsession and Disgust,”
The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 140–191. Also again Francis
Bacon, “Of Love” (1596):” it is a strange thing, to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves
the nature, and value of things, by this; that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole, is comely in
nothing but in love. Neither is it merely in the phrase; for whereas it hath been well said, that the
arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man’s self; certainly the lover
is more . . .” at www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-11.html.
154 matthew sharpe
is something almost automatic – Lacan says “structural” – about the firings
of Cupid’s “dribbling darts.” (Meas. for Meas. I. iii)
Such a disenchanted reflection, however, is surely no good way to
end a chapter concerning love and comedy, any more than the bard
thought he could end MND’s comedic revelations without sugaring the
pill, through the mouth of “honest Puck.” Let me instead close by
underlining that to understand, through Lacan or Shakespeare, the
extent to which love is subject to the vicissitudes of misrecognition,
imaginary rivalry, and the contingencies of our symbolic roles is in no
way to rob us of the capacity for wonder at Shakespeare’s art. The poet
presents this desublimated vision of the ars amatoria in the most
beautiful language imaginable, and with a truly impish sense of play,
so that we laugh, rather than weep. And if such an apology be not
enough, let us at least, like the playwright, mouth the parting words of
Robin Goodfellow himself as our messenger:
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call . . .
(MND V, i)
W O RK S CI T ED
Bacon, Francis. Promus of Formularies and Elegancies. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
& Co., 1883.
Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its
Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.
Calderwood, James L. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Anamorphism and
Theseus’ Dream Author.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42.4 (Winter 1991):
409–430.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Unconscious.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14 Translated by James Strachey.
London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. Chrysoma Associates
Limited Publications Division Electronic Books Library, 2000–2005.
Krajnik, Filip. “In the Shadow of Night: Sleeping and Dreaming and Their
Technical Roles in Shakespearian Drama.” Durham theses, Durham
University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7764/
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 2002.
“The Signification of the Phallus.” In Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002. 575–584.
Seminar V. December 18, 1957. Unpublished papers.
Seminar III: The Psychoses 1955–1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated
by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.
Shakespeare, William. Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. London: Bloomsbury,
1998.
Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy (Short Circuits). Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009.
chapter 9
Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy

Measure for Measure after Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics
Geoff Boucher
“To step from Twelfth Night into Measure for Measure is to step
from the Renaissance into the Reformation.”
—Leo Salinger.
What is the psychoanalytic theory of tragicomedy?

There is none, of course.
But perhaps that’s a stupid kind of trick question. And anyway – what does
it matter that there is none? Isn’t tragicomedy a liminal mode – the result
of a contrived aesthetic tension between comedy and tragedy, or worse,
John Fletcher’s “tragedy with a happy ending”?
In this chapter, I want to propose that despite the problem that there is
virtually no literary-critical theory of tragicomedy that meets with inter-
subjective agreement, psychoanalysis nonetheless needs to grapple with the
phenomenon. Tragicomedy emerges in distinctively modern moments of
deep socio-cultural crisis, where the post-traditional disintegration of the
metaphysical foundations of cultural formations is particularly evident.
The wager of this chapter is that the historical inflection of Žižek’s
Lacanian dialectics – and particularly the category of a “crisis in symbolic
authority” – holds the key to the aesthetics of tragicomedy. According to
Žižek, a crisis of symbolic authority is a crisis in the cultural framework of
a social formation – the Symbolic Order – in which the legitimacy of the
most important norms and beliefs is thrown into question. Under these
conditions, the symbolic investiture of individuals into socially-mandated
forms of institutional authority fails, because the metaphysical or ideo-
logical foundations for the institution have lost credibility. The law, in
effect, is smeared with what Žižek calls an “obscene enjoyment,” a libidinal
excess “beyond the pleasure principle” that infects its agents. These sud-
denly appear to be transformed from legitimate representatives of social
norms into abusers of power aiming at forbidden satisfactions.
156
Measure for Measure after Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics 157
The key reason for this is that although an image of potency and
authority grounded in the mythology of a golden age or of human nature
has been dethroned, its replacement with a unifying symbolic substitute
has not become hegemonic. What remains is what Žižek describes as the
“malevolent neutrality” of a set of social regulations that have been arbitrar-
ily imposed on individuals as a mindless duty of obedience, together with a
terrifying guilt about the multitude of evils that the image of authority had
kept at bay. Such a process is particularly evident in the Reformation’s
iconoclastic destruction of medieval images of divine benevolence, which is
accompanied by the theology of a terrifyingly inhuman God of election
and reprobation. Here, the symbolic dimension of divine providence
becomes impossible to extricate from the anxiety caused by the doctrine
of universal human depravity.
I maintain that this is expressed aesthetically in artworks that explore the
impossibility of the reconciliation of social and personal conflict, some-
thing that happens once tragic fate and comic coincidence no longer make
sense. In light of the fact that tragicomedy as a distinctive dramatic mode
emerges in response to the lack of a guarantee for the meaningfulness of
human existence, the absence of a psychoanalytic theory of this aesthetic
formation is striking. I want to test this hypothesis against Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure, which thematises the link between the Reformation
and tragicomedy in its “theatre of disgrace.” To some extent, my intention
here is to “translate” Richard Wheeler’s Freudian interpretation of the
play into the wider terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis.1 My contention
is that Measure for Measure dramatises the consequences of the evacuation
of the imaginary representation of the deity, in the “bittersweet” impossi-
bility of reconciliation following the Calvinist Reformation in Elizabethan
England.
Tragicomedy as specifically modern

Recent literary theory has positioned tragicomedy against the background
of the combined impact of historical catastrophe and the collapse of
metaphysical worldviews. That development, which might as well be
summed up in the slogan of the death of God, involves the disintegration
of the everyday substrate for the religious conception of reconciliation.
Aside from the mid-point of the terrible twentieth century, the other
1
See Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 92–153.
158 geoff boucher
moment in literary and dramaturgical history characterised by the cultural
centrality of tragicomedy is the short period from the 1580s to the begin-
ning of the English Civil War. Rather than being an unimportant, liminal
mode, then, I suggest that tragicomedy is the fundamental dramatic
response to an “absurd universe”:
In a universe without absolutes, tragedy is impossible. In such a universe,
comedy is no longer possible either, for man seems to be nowhere. . . . [I]t is
an indisputable historical fact that the decay of both tragedy and comedy is
paralleled by a spectacular rise of the mixed dramatic genres, the most
exquisite of which is tragicomedy. By some strange process of aesthetic
alchemy, the tragic sense of awe is felt again in this hybrid genre, and so is
the irresistible appeal of the comic. . . . In other words, while in what is left
of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ the religious framework is either deliberately
broken down or crumbling due to its own inadequacy, modern tragic
farce . . . concentrates on man sub specie aeterni and asks those questions
concerning the nature of man and his significance in the universe that were
formerly the exclusive domain of tragedy. . . . As a result, modern tragicom-
edy becomes a kind of [post-]metaphysical drama.2
Although Elizabethan literary critics recognised the originality of tragi-
comedy, they struggled to shift beyond the intuition that this was a
potentially important novelty and articulate its theoretical significance. It
was known that Plautus had coined the term in the preface to Amphit-
ryon3, but the reference is sarcastic because it denotes the nullity of an
absurd syncretism. Interestingly, recent critics have corroborated the Eliza-
bethan insight, proposing that ancient tragedy and comedy existed in
disjunction or “synkrisis,” as the religious origins of the dramatic festivals
precluded exploration of the metaphysical abyss that tragicomedy presup-
poses. From this perspective, Aristophanes’ parody of some tragedians in
his well-known comedies operates in the interests of a retrenchment of
tradition in the assertoric mode, rather than an overture to the scepticism
(or despair) of tragicomedy. The possible exception is the late works of
Euripides, which introduce significant comic elements into tragedy in a
context where scepticism about the existence of cosmic reason is explicitly
raised in the subject matter of the drama. However, in light of Euripides’
eccentric and critical cultural position – documented under the sign of
2
Karl Guthke. Modern Tragicomedy: An Investigation into the Nature of the Genre (New York: Random
House, 1966), 98–100.
3
See George Hunter, “Elizabethan Theatrical Genres and Literary Theory,” in The Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism. Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 36.
unremitting hostility by Aristophanes – this exception tends to confirm the
rule that it is only once the notion of an absurd or absent God becomes
widespread that tragicomedy emerges as a popular genre.
Descriptions of tragicomedy as a distinct form really begin from
“Cinthio” (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), whose sixteenth-century analysis of
Orlando Furioso identified the specific deviation of Renaissance Romance
from the classical model provided by The Odyssey.4 Strongly influenced by
the Catholic Reformation (also known in Northern European contexts as
the “Counter-Reformation”), Cinthio proposed that tragicomedy repre-
sented the perfect literary and dramatic mode for modern conditions.5 But
for Cinthio, somewhat problematically, tragicomedy is merely “tragedy
with a happy ending”6; a definition subsequently adopted by Fletcher
and probably known to Shakespeare.7
The resurgence of tragicomedy in the twentieth century goes beyond
a polemical stance towards the ideological remainders of the medieval
period, recognising that what has been lost is not only religion, but also
its secular imitators, such as liberal humanism. The abandonment of
humanity in the “absurd universe” that results is aesthetically expressed
through modern tragicomedy.8 It can hardly be maintained that this
represents an irrelevant curiosity: modern tragicomedy of the twentieth
century ranks amongst the most significant work of the epoch. This
includes Beckett’s dramatic works, the “theatre of the absurd” – Ionescu,
Genet, Pinter, Stoppard, Dürrenmatt, Albee, Dario Fo, Arrabal – and
Sartre’s No Exit.
Like the novel, then – that historically new “form of no form” that
emerges from Romance at the same historical moment, in the works of
Cervantes, and which also fascinated Shakespeare – tragicomedy is a
quintessentially modern, contested mode.9 Perhaps this should be heavily
underlined, for this kinship with the novel as a negation of the Christian
world is crucial. Mark William Roche argues on Hegelian lines against
the dismissal of the tragicomic mode as a “mixed form” lacking dramatic
integrity, on the basis that rigid adherence to the classical typology
4
See Marvin Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France and England. 2nd
edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 70.
5 6
See ibid., 68–72. Ibid., 135.
7
See Raphael Lyne’s introduction to In Early Modern Tragicomedy, eds. Raphael Lyne and Subha
Mukherji (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2007), 1–21.
8
See Richard Dutton, Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee
and Storey (Brighton: Harvester, 1986).
9
See David Hirst, Tragicomedy (London: Methuen, 1984), 5–12.
160 geoff boucher
(tragedy, comedy) neglects the late classical and medieval emergence of
Romance, and its dramatic correlate, the drama of reconciliation.10
Through the lens of Hegelian dialectics, then, the “bittersweet” irresolution
of tragicomedy is not the result of the combination of tragic and comic
modes, but of the specific effect produced when tragic potential irrupts
into the Romance mode but is resolved through comic devices.
“The superego is law run amok”

Tragicomedy emerges as aesthetically central during moments of crisis in
the foundations of modern cultural formations, as the drama of the
negation of reconciliation expresses the impossibility of a metaphysical
guarantee for the meaningfulness of human existence. From the perspec-
tive of Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics, this situation involves tilting a cultural
formation towards the abyss of the “non-existence of the Other,” a crisis of
symbolic authority that happens because of the disintegration of the social
fantasy (i.e., the collective mythology).
According to Žižek’s definition, symbolic authority indicates the way
that agents are authorised to perform certain kinds of speech acts, by virtue
of their enactment of a social role that is legitimised by the underlying
semantic and normative structure of the background culture. Following
Lacan, Žižek describes this background in terms derived from Claude
Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology as a “Symbolic Order,” which refers
to the structural “code” from which cultural “messages” are composed.
The Symbolic Order is centred on the “law of the signifier,” the law that
the signifier and the signified, or “message” and “meaning,” are arbitrarily
related, by virtue of a “signifier without signified,” or master signifier,
which “fixes,” or assigns, semantic relationships within the cultural back-
ground. This is Lacan’s general equivalent to Freud’s notion that cultural
arrangements are centred on the prohibition against incest, that is to say,
on the mandating of forms of exogamy. According to Lacan, the Symbolic
Order is represented intrasubjectively as the “big Other,” the locus of the
signifier in the psyche, equivalent to Freud’s “paternal imago.” When
symbolic authority functions efficiently, unconscious belief in the big
Other of the Symbolic Order authorises the representatives of social insti-
tutions to make definitive judgements:
10
See Mark William Roche, Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel (Albany:
State University of New York, 1998), 248–257.
During the last election campaign in Slovenia . . . a member of the ruling
political party was approached by an elderly lady from his local constitu-
ency, asking him for help. She was convinced that the street number of
her house (not the standard 13, but 23) was bringing her bad luck – the
moment her house got this new number, due to some administrative
reorganisation, misfortunes started to afflict her (burglars broke in, a
storm tore the roof off, neighbours started to annoy her), so she asked
the candidate to be so kind as to arrange with the municipal authorities
for the number to be changed. The candidate made a simple suggestion
to the lady: why didn’t she do it herself? Why didn’t she simply replace
or repaint the plate with the street number herself by, for example,
adding another number or letter (say, 23A . . .)? The old lady answered:
‘Oh, I tried that a few weeks ago . . . but it didn’t work – my bad luck is
still with me, you can’t cheat it, it has to be done properly, with the
relevant state institution.’ The ‘it’ which cannot be duped in this way is
the Lacanian big Other, the symbolic institution.11
Crises of symbolic authority typically emerge when the master signifier is
rendered inconsistent because it is revealed as permeated by enjoyment.
This is something that is characteristically expressed through the idea that
the representatives of “the relevant state institution” merely manipulate
their power for personal ends.
Historically speaking, though, reconciliatory fantasies have disintegrated
often – for instance, in the scepticism of the Greek Enlightenment during
the fifth century in Athens adverted to already, or in the breakup of
polytheism in the late Hellenistic world that generates both Romance
and Christianity. What is specific about modern cultural formations that
catalyses the emergence of tragicomedy?
According to the well-known Weberian thesis, modernity begins with
the Reformation’s “disenchantment of the world,” that is, its destruction
of the supernatural population of the pre-modern “enchanted garden” of
angels, demons, folk spirits and miracle-workers. The world is regarded as
a vast natural mechanism, abandoned by God after the resurrection of
Christ and left to execute the pre-destined movements inscribed in the
providential plan for the salvation of the elect and the reprobation of the
damned. The historical consequence of this momentous development is
the Enlightenment, namely, the moment when modern communities
must generate their own normativity from political deliberations and
public debate, without reference to metaphysical cosmologies and religious
11
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London & New York:
Verso, 1999), 326.
162 geoff boucher
traditions. This makes modern social formations fundamentally political
rather than religious. The entire process is often summarily described by
what Claude Lefort calls the “dissolution of the markers of certainty” that
is emblematised by the French revolution’s execution of the divinely
appointed sovereign and creation of an “empty place of power.” The
English Civil War does exactly the same thing, of course, only one
hundred years in advance of Lefort’s exemplar. Drawing upon a Lacanian
vocabulary, followers of Lefort such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
explain that modern societies depend upon a symbolic representation of
the social formation as a self-identical totality. This symbolization occupies
the empty place of power and provides a focus for the imaginary unifica-
tion of society. Unlike premodern social formations, however, which
anchor the social imaginary in religious certainties, modern political
“master signifiers” are fundamentally displaceable. No doubt, the master
signifiers of nationalism are relatively permanent, but, as the international-
ist, communist interlude in the twentieth century demonstrates, substi-
tutes for the nation can be conceived in the modern world in a way that is
unimaginable in traditional societies.
I suggest that Žižek’s work holds the key to grasping the effects of these
social developments on modern subjectivity. The “emptying of the place of
power” in modern societies implies the contingency of those social values
that subjects introject as ego ideals in the process of socialization. Further-
more, the discontinuity between prince and pope, as bearers of these ideals,
and the head of the family unit, as responsible for discipline and punish-
ment, is erased, replaced by a paternal figure who is at once a representation
of the ideal and a force of wrath. Finally, the breakup of the extended,
traditional family and its replacement by the bourgeois, nuclear family – a
process catalysed by the Reformation’s unleashing of individualism – means
that the sovereign cannot successfully pose as the “father of the nation.”
Accordingly, Žižek proposes that modern formations of the unconscious
involve a novel mutation in the relation between the subject and the
Symbolic Order: “in the modern bourgeois nuclear family, the two func-
tions of the father which were previously separated, that is, embodied in
different people (the pacifying ego-ideal, the point of ideal identification,
and the ferocious superego, the agent of cruel prohibition; the symbolic
function of totem and the horror of taboo), are united in one and the same
person.”12 In Lacanian terms, modernity is characterised by the inconsist-
ency of the master signifier, something that brings the “non-existence of
12
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 313.
the Other” perilously close to the surface of everyday life. The mutation in
the Oedipal dynamic that Žižek describes generates modern competitive
individualism: the “empty place of power” characteristic of democratic
politics and the Reformation’s shift from external observance of social rules
to the internalization of the agency of judgement. But, by contrast with
traditional social formations, it also – notoriously – generates problems of
relativism and of the breakdown of social solidarity, of nihilism and
anomie, including cultural epidemics of melancholia or, more recently,
depression. As Žižek says:
The paradox here is that the obscene superego underside is, in one and the
same gesture, the necessary support of the public Law and the traumatic
vicious circle, the impasse that the subject endeavours to avoid by way of
taking refuge in public Law – in order to assert itself, public Law has to
resist its own foundation, to render it invisible.13
We might think about the modern mutation in the Symbolic Order in
terms of two shifts: the shift from the imaginary ego ideal to the symbolic
function of totem, and the collapsing of the distance between the symbolic
function of totem and the horror of taboo. The Imaginary image of God,
in other words, recedes to an infinite distance, emptying out a place that
the Sovereign, as God’s lieutenant, temporarily occupies, but in the figure
of the Sovereign, the pacifying role of legislator and the terrifying dictator
who stands above the law are united in one.14 The duality of the symbolic
law and its obscene superego supplement – or, the inconsistency of the
master signifier – has important political implications, not least of which is
the division between the public sphere and the private domain:
When, as a consequence of the bourgeois egalitarian ideology’s rise to
power, the public space loses its directly patriarchal character, the relation-
ship between public Law and its obscene superego underside also undergoes
a radical change. In traditional patriarchal society, the inherent transgres-
sion of the Law assumes the form of a carnivalesque reversal of authority:
the King becomes a beggar, madness poses as wisdom, and so forth. . . .
However, once the public Law casts off its direct patriarchal dress and
presents itself as neutral-egalitarian, the character of its obscene double also
undergoes a radical shift: what now erupts in the carnivalesque suspension
of the “egalitarian” public Law is precisely the authoritarian-patriarchal
logic that continues to determine our attitudes, although its direct public
13
Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London & New York:
Verso, 1994), 61.
14
See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968), §11:25, 13, 18:4–12.
164 geoff boucher
expression is no longer permitted. “Carnival” thus becomes the outlet for the
repressed social jouissance: Jew-baiting, riots, gang rapes . . .15
In this context, the “malevolent neutrality” of the superego, its libidinal
and aggressive instigation of sadistic punishments on the subject, together
with the moral masochism of guilty introspection characteristic of the
Reformation’s turn to the centrality of conscience, is released. “The most
elementary definition of the superego,” Žižek writes, is that “the superego is
law ‘run amok’ insofar as it prohibits what it formally permits,” or, what
amounts to the same thing, that the superego conflates proscription with
prescription.16
Žižek’s most important example of the “law run amok” and the
resulting crisis of symbolic authority, the breakdown in the authority of
a judge, is apposite for Measure for Measure. The smooth operation of
symbolic authority means that “despite the fact that I know that this
person is in real life a corrupt weakling, nonetheless, in their official
function, I treat them with the respect due to a bearer of universal
justice.”17 The rancorous mood of the revenge tragedies and the scabrous
ambience of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragicomedy illustrate what
happens once this belief in the magical power of symbolic investiture
collapses in the cynical teeth of the materialist knowledge propagated by
the “new philosophy” of the Renaissance. Žižek describes this as signify-
ing a collapse of the symbolic order, its fragmentation into a multiplicity
of domains of signification. The Lacanian thesis that “the big Other does
not exist” indicates the absence of a final guarantee that the subject’s
message will be registered in the symbolic order (the lack of a definitive
symbolic mandate for the subject). By contrast, the collapse of the big
Other implies cynical disbelief in symbolic efficiency, something that
happens once the reconciliatory fantasy disintegrates.
Elizabethan tragicomedy and the crisis of symbolic authority

The period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation instigates the
opening phase of this process, by virtue of the disintegration of the great
chain of being and collapse in belief in the possibility of miracles – that is,
the “disenchantment of the world.” Under these conditions, as one of
Žižek’s cothinkers, Miran Božovič has noted, religious convictions become
a leap of faith; doctrinal fideism and mechanical materialism are correlates,
15
Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, 56. 16
Ibid., 66.
17
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 325.
not opposites.18 It is against this background that literary theory in the
Reformation tried to make sense of tragicomedy, as an expression of
hopeless struggle lacking the certainty of metaphysical dignity, and of
farcical coincidence no longer coordinated by a higher power.
Measure for Measure belongs to Shakespeare’s traditionally designated
[social] “problem plays,” springing from the middle period of his writing,
after the festive comedies and great tragedies. Although long regarded
critically as aberrations, they in fact belong to the cultural fashion for
tragicomedy that was part of the wider “epidemic of paradoxes” of the
seventeenth century.19 This widespread cultural anxiety, which included
concern about melancholy, paradox and nihilism, was ultimately generated
by the reformation’s insistence on the “absent God” of predestination and
providence.20
The theological context for Measure for Measure is insisted upon by the
title and theme, which advert to a signature passage from the Sermon on
the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement
ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again” (Matt. 7:1–2 KJE).
Accordingly, the design of the play involves the exposure of (self)
righteous censoriousness as hypocritical posturing, which is soon under-
mined by natural inclinations, thereby raising – but not resolving – social
questions of considerable complexity, demanding significant maturity of
judgement. And the play is potentially very funny – or, at least, it should
be amusing: the puritanical judge exposed, the righteous novitiate
betrothed, the fornicator redeemed through a now reluctant marriage
and the libertine matched with the prostitute. Then there is a vigorous
instance of that hardy perennial, the bed trick, and a flash of farcical meta-
comedy in the head trick that matches it; the sighing bride-to-be restored
to her hopes and the Duke married off to a paragon of virtue once she is
redeemed from judgemental severity.
The symmetry between Angelo and Claudio is crucial to this design.
Claudio’s premature consummation with Juliet, although morally ambiguous,
18
See Miran Božovič, “Malebranche’s Occasionalism, or, Philosophy in the Garden of Eden,” in In
Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 149–174; and
Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: New
York: Verso, 2012), 334–335.
19
See Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton:
20
See John Schwindt, “Luther’s Paradoxes and Shakespeare’s God: The Emergence of the Absurd in
Sixteenth-century Literature,” Modern Language Studies 15.4 (1985): 4–12.
166 geoff boucher
is only equivocally criminal, while Angelo’s rejection of Mariana –
although brutal – is likewise legal and acceptable.21 In other words, the
legal circumstances are complex, the ethical situation is difficult, and the
spiritual position, although sinful, involves lack of continence rather than a
deadly offense. But that is not how Angelo, who, following Calvin, sees the
world in terms of a simple alignment of temporal law, ethical life, human
nature and spiritual salvation, regards the matter.
Angelo’s puritanical judgement on Claudio represents an excess spring-
ing from the lack of fit between ethical conventions and natural inclin-
ations. The play, through the agency of the Duke and the device of the bed
trick, turns the tables on Angelo by placing him in a position identical to
that occupied by Claudio, but not before it has revealed to him the
urgency of his sexual needs, as he travesties morality and legality in his
efforts to capture Isabella and then escape judgement. Isabella, meanwhile,
is soon confronted by the fact that her treasured moral rectitude is founded
on a horror of sexuality that is closely related to Angelo’s anxious puritan-
ism. The comic design of Measure for Measure is now clear: abstract moral
absolutism is undermined by the concreteness of human needs, exploited
through the humorous potential of a series of comic devices, in a context
where the inexpugnability of sexual inclinations corrodes the rigid conven-
tionality of the cultural order.
Behind the uncertainty provoked by the disintegration of the imaginary
representation of the divinity lie the deeper libidinal economies of Refor-
mation theology, something which directly informs the disturbing effects
generated by Measure for Measure. As Herman Westerink has demon-
strated mainly with reference to Luther, the Protestant disenchantment
of the world entails the absence of an interventionist deity capable of
preventing the atrocities implied in the doctrine of original sin.22 An
abyss opens around the reconciliation of the problem of evil and the
probability that the Devil is the king of this world, on the one hand,
with the theological requirement that God be omnipotent and omnisci-
ent, on the other hand. In the end, Luther proposes a God who even
before the Fall hates humanity implacably and wishes the destruction
of the world, utterly unintelligible to human reason and entirely inscrut-
able from the perspective of temporal morality. Further questioning,
21
See Marliss Desens, The Bed Trick in English Renaissance Drama: Explorations in Gender, Sexuality
and Power (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 223–224.
22
See Herman Westerink, The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation
Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2012).
announces Luther, imperils faith: “it becomes us not to inquire;” “it bids
us to stop before the supreme majesty of the hidden God.”23 Although
Calvin’s stress on universal depravity points to the drives as the origins of
human conduct and condemns desire for its basis in natural sexuality, his
inquiry into the authorship of original sin eventually leads him also to
propose a “dark god of wrath,” beyond good and evil, at the foundation
of the universe.24
Calvin’s doctrine – central to the English Reformation – leads from
universal depravity, via the contingency of grace, to doctrines of predestin-
ation (the fateful assignment before time of salvation or reprobation to
every individual qua guilty of original sin) and providence (the intellectual
reassurance that despite the bewildering certainty that this damns millions
of apparent innocents, the divine design nonetheless achieves the spiritual
good). In the context of human fallibility, no guarantees can be provided
to believers of their election to the kingdom of heaven, except perhaps
certain indications of their deferred reprobation such as success, family and
charity. In the Lacanian terms developed by Žižek, then, the effect of the
Reformation is to volatise the medieval Imaginary – the iconography of
God as a benevolent father – and replace it with the Symbolic representa-
tion of the locus of the divine (predestination, providence) in terms of an
exacting ethical code. But this puritanical ethics is accompanied by the
“malevolent neutrality of the superego,” the terror and anxiety of a hidden
God whose inscrutable dictates are mechanically followed by the indiffer-
ent universe, wracking the believer with guilt while providing the dark
enjoyment that belongs to God’s hatred of humanity – the spectacle of
human suffering amidst universal depravity. In psychoanalytic terms, the
relation between the drives and desire is intrasubjectively constituted in the
locus of the Other, but this locus is rendered inconsistent by its perme-
ation with enjoyment.
Angelo
The figure of Angelo is a representation of hardline Calvinist morality, a
form of subjectivity that is articulated within a discursive modality satur-
ated with guilt and fixated on the imaginary distinctions between good
and evil, licit and illicit, ideal and natural. Against the background of a
23
Luther, qtd. in Westerink, The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early
Reformation Thought, 54.
24
Ibid, 37–38, 58–59.
168 geoff boucher
contemporary Puritan drive to punish fornication with death,25 the play
begins when the symbolic authority thrust upon the magistrate, Angelo,
suddenly positions him as the executor of those “strict statutes and most
biting laws” (1.3.19) hitherto in abeyance. Chief amongst these is the law
against fornication that punishes with decapitation those “filthy vices”
(2.4.42) that bubble in the cesspool of the Viennese underworld of brothels
and taverns. Claudio, unfortunately captured in the sweep after consum-
mating his engagement to Juliet somewhat before the actual marriage,
protests that she is “fast my wife” (1.2.124), but to no avail, for in Angelo’s
judgement Claudio is guilty of evil intention and an illegal act (2.1.17–31).
Now, although the Duke demands that Angelo enforce the Viennese
laws, it is crucial to note that the details of their application is in line with
Angelo’s Calvinist ethical interpretation of what would have been, in
context, an ambiguous case. English common law in the sixteenth century
recognised what we would describe as a public engagement as effectively
marriage, provided that this was framed as a declaration rather than as a
promise. Fornication in this context was believed to be a sin, but that was
a matter of reprobation for enjoyment or salvation through repentance;
the law merely frowned (through a fine) on private declarations and on
pre-ceremonial consummations. The purpose of the enforcement of
such laws was basically to give offenders a spiritual scare. According to
Hooker’s gloss on Augustine, these make certain that “those things which
were known have authority;” their relative lenience is because it is crucial
not to presume the perspective of the last judgement, which collapses sin
into death.26
But fornication for Calvinism was an explosive question because of the
presumed link between original sin and Edenic sexuality, which linked
disobedience towards the Ten Commandments with human nature in a
single figure of fundamental depravity. For Angelo, the image of that
“demigod Authority”27 that he is to represent involves a fixed opposition
between right and wrong, virtue and vice, where the “hideous law” (1.4.62)
clearly demarcates, according to a static set of denotations, good from evil.
Accordingly, when Escalus pleads on Claudio’s behalf to Angelo the
technicalities of common law marriage and the promptings of young
25
See, for example, Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1965), 211.
26
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Preface, Books I and VIII) (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 1989), 1.120.
27
John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 1989), 1.2.100. All future citations can be found in
the body of the essay.
blood, Angelo’s dismissal of all complexity is in line with a distrust of
human depravity by a characteristically Calvinist ascetic who “doth rebate
and blunt his natural edge / With profits of the mind, study and fast”
(1.4.59–60).
It is as Vincentio alleges: “Lord Angelo is precise, / Stands at a guard
with envy, scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is
more to bread than stone” (1.3.50–53). Angelo’s frozen posture is the
correlate of his imaginary identifications: he regards with “pride” the
“gravity” of his righteous adherence to the letter of the law (2.4.9-10),
which he takes as nothing less than evidence of election (2.2.180–181),
while in punishing “evil” intentions he reverses original sin and appeases a
godlike authority (2.2.96–99).
For Angelo, however, in a display of the Reformation’s contribution to
the increasing discontent of civilization, ethical distinctions between “good”
and “evil” depend upon the repression of sexuality from the field of signifi-
cation. Let me briefly clarify this point. Lacan maintains that speech
involves a certain “polyphony” where “there is no signifying chain that does
not sustain – as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units – all
attested contexts that are, so to speak, ‘vertically’ linked.” The polysemy
that this situation makes possible is what leads Lacan to speak of the
“floating” of the signifier above the “flowing” of the signified, that is, to
a condition of ambivalence and equivocation as inherent to language.
Repression, on this account, involves the imaginary fixation of some
signifiers to a limited pool of signifieds – where the residual possible
meanings are repressed into the unconscious – in what amounts to a rigid
semantics governed by extremely strong affective reactions (such as dis-
gust). In the early modern context, the fixed assignment of signifieds to
signifiers that this suggests involves a discourse where everything culturally
prohibited – especially sexuality – is semantically voided and connected to
animal imagery, “rightly” excluded from the field of meaningfulness and
legitimacy. What these imaginary identifications particularly hold at bay is
carnality considered as bestiality, something that, in the Calvinist discourse
of “Vienna,” the law denotes as evil because it is a form of self-destructive
contamination.
Indeed, it is the degraded animality of human nature that unmistake-
ably marks out the represented world as Puritanical, for Calvin’s imagery
of nature centred on the opposition between the bestial and the godlike,
with depravity figured in animal terms. As Peter Huff has noted: “raging
winds and churning seas shape the landscape of [Calvin’s] thought, while
growling beasts and twittering birds render his work a veritable bestiary of
170 geoff boucher
Christian doctrine.”28 Meanwhile, Satan’s “power is like ‘the jaws of a
mad and raging lion,’ while his temptations, enticing the saints into
rebellion and ruin, betray an insidious human quality as ‘the mousetraps
of his treachery.’”29
The excluded substance of human nature is at once irresistible and
shameful, so that sexuality represents ineluctable depravity and excruci-
ating “waste,” springing from original sin – believed to involve fornication.
The animal imagery connected with sexual impulses is pervasively repre-
sented in terms of a degrading form of self-contamination and self-
destruction. This acute feeling for the impossibility of satisfaction of the
drives is best summed up in Claudio’s comment that “Our natures do
pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil; and
when we drink we die” (1.3.13–15).
Both Angelo and Isabella exist in discursive frameworks that rely on a
highly conventional relation to the order of the signifier, characterized by
denotations for the strict demarcation between permission and prohib-
ition, corresponding to an imaginary rigidity in cultural codes. In Lacanian
terms, the pervasive Calvinist discourse in Measure for Measure represents a
transition from the imaginary register to the symbolic register that is
incomplete, fixated on demand, so that the emergence of desire through
symbolic equivocation represents a crisis for the subject. In particular,
two related crises shake Angelo: the repression of desire through efforts
to fix the signification of illegality as equivalent to sin; and the return of
the repressed, in the invasion of sexuality within idealization through the
ambiguities of “sense.”
Angelo’s fierce repression is orchestrated through the Calvinist discourse
on the avoidance of sin, articulated through a conception of the damnation
that accompanies illicit intentions. In contradistinction to Anglican and
Catholic practice, Calvin condemned all transgressions of the law as
equally grave evidences of the “filth of sin.”30 The idea that all sins deserve
damnation and involve spiritual death was part of an argument against any
gradation amongst transgressions that might reflect the legal practice of
proportional retribution. Its corollary, eagerly accepted by the Puritans,
was that every civil and criminal offense, as a spiritual transgression
meriting the destruction of the soul, deserved the ultimate retribution in
28
Peter Huff, “Calvin and the Beasts,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42.1 (1999): 68.
29
Ibid., 73.
30
Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge. 4th edn. (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1960), 3.4.17–18.
the death penalty. This plays out parodically in Measure for Measure,
when Angelo’s idea of the equivalence of fornication and murder
(2.4.42–49 and 51–54) becomes a lure to entrap the novitiate Isabella into
accepting that she might “redeem” her brother Claudio by “giv[ing] up
[her] body to . . . sweet uncleanness” (2.4.53) with the suddenly desirous
magistrate. For Angelo, this “thing enskied and sainted” (1.4.34) is entirely
virtuous. Yet in a reflexive inversion, it is precisely Isabella’s purity that is
sexually compelling.
What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo? / Dost thou desire her foully for
those things / That make her good? O, let her brother live! / Thieves for
their robbery have authority / When judges steal themselves. What, do
I love her, / That I desire to hear her speak again, / And feast upon her eyes?
What is’t I dream on? / O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, / With
saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous / Is that temptation that doth
goad us on / To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet, / With all
her double vigour, art and nature, / Once stir my temper; but this virtuous
maid / Subdues me quite (2.2.177–190).
Angelo’s sudden desire for Isabella happens when the virginal image of
woman is reconnected with its flipside, the idea of promiscuous feminin-
ity, in a return of the repressed where sexual discontents invade moral
ideals developed as mechanisms for the repression of drive impulses. From
the Lacanian perspective, it is crucial to note that this happens through the
agency of the signifier. As William Empson showed in the 1950s, the
ambivalence of sense is the place where the equivocal character of language
stages a return of the repressed, subverting the rigid semantics of Angelo’s
Calvinist legalism by disclosing the sensuality latent within ideality.31 The
kernel of Empson’s exhaustive analysis of every instance of the word
“sense” in Measure for Measure is that it is grasped in historical context
as denoting both ideal meaning and carnal sensuality. “She speaks,”
wonders Angelo in an aside as he rejects Isabella’s plea on behalf of her
brother, “and ‘tis / Such sense, that my sense breeds with it” (2.2.148–149).
“Can it be,” he asks, bewildered and appalled at his own arousal, “that
modesty may more betray our sense / Than woman’s lightness? Having
waste ground enough / Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary / And pitch
our evils there? O, fie, fie, fie!” (2.2.168–172). It is “sense” that erects the
problem of carnal desire right in the heart of the Calvinist “sanctuary” of
ideal rectitude: Angelo’s sudden desire for Isabella happens when the
imaginary ideals that fix the signified of “sense” against symbolic fluidity
31
See William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977).
172 geoff boucher
become reflexively invested with desire, as a result of the twisting around
of “sense” into “sense,” ideality into sensuality, virginity into sexuality.
In the Lacanian conception, this is not surprising, because desire as a
reflexive movement happening in the field of signification implies the
potential for reflexive twist or chiasmatic reversal of the purity of desire
into the desire for purity, or the impossibility of desire for the desire for
impossibility. As Žižek notes:
sexuality is not a traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot
attain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in
principle, can ‘contaminate’ any activity. When we are engaged in an
activity which fails to attain its goal directly, and gets caught in a repetitive
vicious cycle, this activity is automatically sexualized.32
Isabella
Isabella, meanwhile, is also a model of the libidinal discontents of hypo-
critical righteousness. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s represen-
tation of Isabella’s moral purity is based on Protestant anti-monastic
polemics about the confusion of internal sanctity with external obedi-
ence.33 But, in light of recent research that locates Shakespeare within
the pro-Catholic recusant community in Stratford-on-Avon and London,
this seems extremely unlikely.34 Rather, Isabella has internalised the
Calvinist idea of total depravity as specifically pertinent to women, by
virtue of the ideological connection between original sin and women’s
concupiscence. According to Calvin:
The Lord prohibits fornication, therefore he requires purity and chastity.
The only method which each has of preserving it is to measure himself by
his capacity. Let no man rashly despise matrimony as a thing useless or
superfluous to him; let no man long for celibacy unless he is able to
dispense with the married state. . . . [L]et everyone, in abstaining from
marriage, do it so long as he is fit to endure celibacy. If he has not the
power of subduing his passion, let him understand that the Lord has made
it obligatory on him to marry. The Apostle shows this when he enjoins:
“Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife and
32
Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 71–72.
33
See Darryl Gless, Measure for Measure: The Law and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979).
34
See Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester &
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004).
let every woman have her own husband.” “If they cannot contain, let
them marry.”35
“The Lord prohibits fornication, therefore he requires purity and chastity”:
Calvin’s injunction is a splendid example of the superegoic conflation of
proscription with prescription. And marriage is here an admission of
spiritual turpitude catalysed by feminine temptation. By way of confirm-
ation of this claim, Calvin immediately goes on to add that men should
not flatter themselves that “by abstaining from the outward act [they]
cannot be accused of unchastity,” because in the presence of his wife the
man’s “mind may be inwardly inflamed with lust.” “Though wedlock veils
the turpitude of incontinence, it does not follow that it ought forthwith to
become a stimulus to it,” the reformer admonishes: “wherefore, let there be
sobriety in the behaviour [of each], so as not to do anything unbecoming
to the dignity and temperance of married life.”36
It is not that the English Puritans “rashly despised” marriage, then, but
that they heartily distrusted women. In this, they shared the common
sense of the early modern period. Within the doctrines of humoral
medicine, femininity was the consequence of excessive humors, while the
female body was regarded as intrinsically “leaky,” which made women
demanding and promiscuous.37 Small wonder, therefore, that their poor
little husbands were liable to become “inwardly inflamed with lust” at the
sight of these coy yet passionate creatures, whose willing souls, at a
moment’s notice, were like to transpire “at every pore with instant fires.”
It is probably unnecessary to dwell at this point on the way that
ideological rectitude here secretes as its repressed inverse a lurid fantasy
about feminine sexual intensity that is the essential support for the period’s
denigration of women.
Measure for Measure here demonstrates its proximity to Hamlet, for both
plays set what Freud described as “the universal tendency to debasement in
the sphere of love” in the context of the Reformation. Hamlet’s abusive
treatment of Ophelia, with his vicious double-entendre on nunnery (sar-
donic Elizabethan slang for a brothel), culturally informs Isabella’s flight to
the convent. As with Angelo’s problems with the ambivalence of “sense,”
Isabella’s nunnery/convent/brothel is an escape from the temptations of
everyday existence as a woman that is simultaneously the moment of the
return of the repressed.
35 36
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 331. Ibid.
37
See Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Oxon & New York: Routledge,
2012).
174 geoff boucher
The imaginary character of the ego ideal at work in this cultural
landscape involves a characteristic projection that swings between women
as virginal ideals and women as debased prostitutes. In what we might
describe as Freud’s “excursus on the denigration of women,” he proposes
that this dichotomy arises for masculine subjects in the context of the
defense mechanism of repression, because the mother is the original sexual
object. According to Freud, this tendency is quasi-universal because the
combination of infantile fixation and adolescent frustration is impossible
to avoid in the context of the increasing renunciation of instinctual
satisfactions characteristic of civilizational progress.38
Freud proposes that the Oedipus Complex is resolved by the repression
of sexual attachments, or libidinal cathexes, to the parents, and an intensi-
fication of non-sexual affection backed by identification with parental
figures, so that eventually genital sexuality is mediated by the desire to
be something like one parent and to have a sexual partner who is effectively
a substitute for the other parent. Freud initially thinks that the love-objects
of the maturing ego are symmetrical for masculine and feminine develop-
ment. Specifically, Freud thinks that masculine subjects originally love
their mothers and therefore regard their fathers as rivals, and that in
consequence of the incestuous wish towards the mother and the parricidal
wish towards the father, they feel threatened by the possibility of paternal
revenge. In infantile phantasy, vengeance is imagined as “castration,”
meaning loss of the phallus. This is counterbalanced by love for the father,
reinforced by the “negative” (or inverted) Oedipus Complex, springing
from the bisexual constitution of human beings, in which the masculine
subject loves the father and hates the mother as a rival. Either way, paternal
revenge or the adoption of a feminine position towards the father will lead
to castration, something that suffuses the ego with sufficient anxiety to
motivate repression of the Oedipal wishes, and which is helped along by
the perception that females, such as mother or sister, lack a penis and must
therefore have been castrated.
Accordingly, the young boy resolves the Oedipus Complex by shifting
from object-cathexis to identification, that is, by renouncing the mother
for a substitute love object and by identification with paternal ideals. Freud
proposes that for normal individuals, the Oedipus Complex is thereby
“abolished” and “destroyed,” although for neurotics, all that is achieved is
its repression, signifying that the core of obsessional neurosis in masculine
38
See Sigmund Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI, 191–208.
subjects is a refusal to renounce the maternal object and a failure to
resolve aggressive rivalry with the paternal figure or ideal. Subsequently,
Freud acknowledges that the pathways into feminine sexuality begin from
love for the mother and resentment of the father, but must then get
turned into a reversed (or “negative”) set of positions. The Oedipal
configuration for feminine heterosexuals must involve love for the father
and resentment of the mother, if the castration complex is to be resolved
through identification with the maternal role and acceptance of a substi-
tute for the father as love object. Either way, for both masculine and
feminine subjects, idealization with repression of the sexual content and
the psychical debasement of the love object represent a fixation on a stage
of development that reflects a failure of the “intensification of identifica-
tion” with “renunciation of the incestuous object” that Freud believes is
the non-neurotic trajectory.39
The Lacanian account of this cultural problem represents a “general
theory” rather than a contradiction of Freud’s “special theory.” Instead of a
developmental trajectory involving the renunciation of pre-genital fixations
on the mother based on a paternal threat of castration, Lacan thinks the
crisis of infantile entry into the field of culture in terms of the opposition
between Imaginary and Symbolic. The Imaginary is the characteristically
binary register of images based in the mirror relation between ego—as the
image of a bodily surface that lends the “fragmented body” its corporeal
unity—and alter ego. By contrast, the Symbolic is the differential register
of language—consisting of differences lacking positive terms—that pro-
vides the sole means for the infant to articulate instinctual needs, repre-
sented as psychical drives, as requests to or demands upon the other.
Because of the scission between the differential register of language and
the binary register of images, everything fixed and whole in the Imaginary
is rendered fluid and partial in the Symbolic, something that the infant
represents mythologically as the lack of an imaginary object of magical
potency—the phallus. Entry into the Symbolic therefore involves “lack,”
or (mythologically) castration, a renunciation of potency that the infantile
subject only reconciles itself to through identification with a special
signifier, the “Name-of-the-Father,” which seems to be that signifier of
lack, or desire, whose ultimate signified is the (fantasy of recovery of the)
lost potency itself. Furthermore, because of the division between the
corporeal reality of the being of the subject and the ontological nullity of
differential signification, the subject seems to have “lost” its existence in
39
Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” 183.
176 geoff boucher
language, which lends to the fantasised signifier of desire the dignity
of being the object-cause of desire. The existence of the subject of the
unconscious is therefore a tragicomedy in which a divided subject desper-
ately seeks a lost object that is, in fact, the product of fantasy, ultimately,
the final resistance of the Imaginary to entry into language.
From the Lacanian perspective, then, the “universal tendency to debase-
ment in the sphere of love” is in the final analysis a consequence of the
refusal to renounce the Imaginary representation of desire as the potency
contained in the bodily image of the special other. John Milton’s Calvinist
masterpiece, Paradise Lost, although completed half a century after Measure
for Measure, reflects the vivid imagery of feminine temptation, lost potency
(the loss of immortality), division between the law of God the Father and
the object-cause of desire (the notorious apple) that informs the theological
Imaginary of the period. Isabella’s conventional purity means that, along-
side Angelo, she too is locked within a set of cultural norms that involve
the duplicity of feminine existence, so that the convent is an escape from
the intolerable contradiction of an existence as a woman, ineluctably both
virgin and whore.
Accordingly, Angelo’s attempted assault on Isabella begins with his
demand that she (un)dress herself in the “destined livery” of woman’s
duality, so that, as Janet Adelman remarks on Measure for Measure:
Angelo’s attempt to compel Isabella’s acquiescence in her own pollution
thus takes the form of forcing her to acknowledge her kinship with [the
prostitute] Juliet (2.4.55), and hence her position as woman, where
“woman” is no more than the sign of sexual frailty.40
But Angelo has no need to instruct Isabella in ambivalence towards
women, since she has thoroughly internalised this perspective herself:
There is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the
blow of justice; / For which I would not plead, but that I must; / For which
I must not plead, but that I am / At war ‘twixt will and will not (2.2.29–33).
The Elizabethan pun on vice/vise here makes explicit the self-loathing,
centred on feminine sexuality, at work in Calvinist discourse.
Now, Isabella’s “war ‘twixt would and would not” resonates with Angelo’s
lament that “Nothing goes right: we would, and we would not” (4.4.32). But
the symmetry between the characters does not stop there. Angelo’s seduction
attempt on Isabella involves the reversal of moral masochism into sexual
40
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays: Hamlet to
The Tempest (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 94.
sadism, in a shocking disclosure of the dark enjoyment at the heart of
the superego’s imperative behind Calvinist guilt. Isabella’s response, mean-
while, involves the adoption of a victimised subject-position, freighted with
imagery of bondage and supported by vivid scenarios of masochistic sexual-
ity. The most important indicator for the sexualization of the superego’s
command at work here is the trace of aggression that permeates Angelo’s
entire conduct toward Isabella. To be certain, he hesitates for a long time on
the brink of an ethical reversal or transvaluation of values that merely inverts
the imaginary schema that has to date determined his subjectivity:
Blood, thou art blood: / Let’s write good angel on the devil’s horn: / ‘Tis
not the devil’s crest (2.4.15–17).
But comic reversal is not really the resting point for this play. Instead,
Angelo’s desire that Isabella “lay down the treasures of [her] body” (2.4.96)
rapidly deploys as an vicious assault on her that is simultaneously a savage
punishment of himself, an “expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” and a
real surplus of pleasure in doing evil:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite; / Lay by all nicety and prolixious
blushes, / That banish what they sue for; redeem thy brother / By yielding
up thy body to my will; / Or else he must not only die the death, / But thy
unkindness shall his death draw out / To lingering sufferance (2.4.161–167).
Moral masochism here abruptly reverses into sexual sadism, but without
losing the aggressive judgement on intention and action proper to the
superego. The superego “knows more about the id than the ego”: Angelo’s
moral rectitude secretes repressed desire that, from the perspective of the
judgement levelled by the superego involves a “dishonoured life / With
ransom of shame” (4.4.29–30) so exquisite that he wishes “death more
willingly than mercy” from the Duke (5.1.472).
Isabella, meanwhile, is surrounded by the imagery of restraint—the
setting of the prison interviews with her brother, the turning of the key
in the lock of the convent door, the administrative coercion exercised by
Angelo—to such a degree that her “chosen vocation is bondage” (Gless
1979, 98, 99-102). Moral masochism and sexualised suffering are reflexively
inter-twined in the suffocating discursive space of Calvinist guilt:
Were I under the terms of death / Th’ impression of keen whips I’d wear as
rubies / And strip myself to death as to a bed / That longing have been sick
for, ere I’d yield / My body up to shame (2.4.101–105).
Having literalised her position of bondage in vivid fantasies of sexual
submission as satisfying punishment, Isabella can enjoy these by proxy
178 geoff boucher
when Mariana is strapped to the bed as her delegate. In this dark version of
the disguise motif, the friendly fecundity of the intelligent young women
of the festive comedies has been transformed within the framework of
Calvinist discourse into an admission of cupidity. Angelo’s simultaneous
degradation of Isabella and devastation of himself reflects a crisis of the
Imaginary that centres on the duplicity of women, as the leading metaphor
of a terrifying loss of signposts to the absolute in a universe abandoned by
God. Angelo’s rigidity, Isabella’s righteousness—these “upright” positions
linked to binary representations of good and evil—collapse in the face of
the fluidity of signification. The confrontation, then, between paternal
authority represented by the Duke and the underworld of illicit sexuality
that is the inverse of Calvinist rectitude is therefore all the more loaded
with significance.
Lucio
Nowhere is the Pauline dialectic of law and sin, as aggravated by the
accusations of the Calvinist superego, more evident in Measure for Measure
than in the relation between Lucio’s promotion of sexuality, the Duke’s
hostile reaction and Claudio’s guilty response to this. Here fornication as
sin—the signifier—is assigned a fixed signification as pollution in the
Imaginary semantics of the law’s rigidity, as part of the repression of desire
by the idealization involved in puritanical righteousness. In this context,
the superego is the gaze that knows about the hidden connection whereby
the obverse of Isabella’s saintliness and Angelo’s righteousness is the
festering corruption of the brothels of the city. The superego gaze stages
the inevitable fall into human depravity that is the verso of the command-
ment against adultery, when this is interpreted as an injunction to “purity
and chastity.”
Depravity centres on sexuality, and sexuality in the lens of Calvinist
guilt is loaded with anxiety and figured as vicious in the dual sense of a vice
that is also cruel. The “thirsty evil” of Claudio’s image of satisfaction as rat
poison is the flipside to Angelo’s notion of the seduction of Isabella as a
“sweet uncleanness.” Sexuality is a “filthy vice,” “sweet uncleanness,” an
“abhorred pollution,” the “dark deed,” a “saucy sweetness” and a “most
offenseful act”; it is a sewer that men and women are driven to ingest, the
better to die in a terror of shame. These anxieties are figured in the play
in terms of the imagery of devouring and defecation, while the law itself
is a harsh restraint—a bond(age)—that bites offenders and covers them
with disgrace.
Desire is not only the relentless maw of an insatiable appetite, but also
the sewerage that results—“Indeed, it does stink in some sort,” announces
Pompey (3.2.26)—because of its incestuous implications. “Is it not a kind
of incest, to take the life / From thine own sister’s shame?” Isabella
demands of Claudio (3.1.138–140). The disgusting guilt aroused by desire
extends into aggressive imagery of devouring bait and excreting poison, the
obverse of its link, via insatiability, with eating and drinking (3.2.95–97
and 4.3.150–152). Of course, the law is a leash and a lash, a restraint for
those who, like Angelo, give their “sensual race the rein,” i.e., “the needful
bits and curbs to headstrong jades” (1.3.19–20). But it is not accidental that
Vincentio then conjures the figure of the law with exactly the same
imagery: the law has lost its teeth and had its appetite blunted (1.3.22–23
and 5.1.318–320). This imagery is extended into the idea of the law as a bird
of prey that will “feast upon [Isabella’s] eyes” (2.2.179). Isabella herself
regards the law as a “perilous mouth” that, when connected to desire,
might “hook both right and wrong to th’ appetite, / To follow as it draws”
(2.4.176–177).
The perverse sexualization of the law against fornication has as its
corollary the investment of death with desire. This extends well beyond
Vincentio’s celebrated advice to Claudio to “be absolute for death” (3.1.5–41),
for Claudio provides another reflexive twist in his sexualization of execu-
tion, which provides a sort of deep ground for the symmetry of the head
trick and the bed trick in the final acts. As Wheeler notes, referencing
Freud’s article on “The Taboo of Virginity,” “Angelo’s enforcement of the
law against fornication projects and transforms an unconscious stricture
that punishes incestuous sexuality with castration, into a legal stricture that
punishes illicit sexuality with beheading.”41 Claudio exclaims in response
to this law:
Why give you me this shame? / Think you I can a resolution fetch / From
flowery tenderness? If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, /
And hug it in mine arms (3.1.80–84).
In this context, it is difficult not to notice that Vincentio, located in the
position of paternal authority, is finally married off to Isabella, positioned
as a feminine subject of that authority, but not before the masculine
subjects, Claudio and Angelo, have been publicly disgraced and symbolic-
ally beheaded. In a moment of spleen, Lucio describes Duke Vincentio as a
“duke of dark corners” (4.3.150); that is, not only is it “impossible to extirp
41
Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, 112.
180 geoff boucher
[lechery] quite, till eating and drinking be put down,” but the Duke
himself “had some feeling for the sport, he knew the service, and that
instructed him to mercy” (3.2.91–92 and 105–107). The Duke’s energetic,
three-act long protest against Lucio’s “slanderous tongue” and “con-
trarious wit” culminates in him declaring Lucio “unpardonable” and
marrying him off to a prostitute before sentencing him to whipping
then hanging, and then commuting this to imprisonment (3.2.174–177;
4.1.59–64; 5.1.495–499).
Vincentio
It is at this point that the Lacanian reading of Measure for Measure parts
company with Wheeler’s Freudian interpretation, for the Duke is no
repetition at a safe distance of Angelo’s oedipal crisis. To the contrary:
the Duke is a figure who is positioned at the origin of the superego gaze,
arranging the totality of the action in the interests of a sadistic enjoyment,
but—for that very reason—at the same time undermining the symbolic
authority of the law by exposing its interest in depravity. Certainly, it is
possible to agree with Wheeler that “the central effort [of the play] seems
to go into dramatizing a Vincentio who, in Angelo’s phrase, presides ‘like
power divine’ over the life of sinning Vienna.”42 That is to say, Vincentio’s
role is to embody and exemplify the symbolic law. But ducal authority at
its core is permeated with enjoyment, subverting symbolic authority in
its foundation.
In Hooker’s semi-Calvinist terms, the very intention and purpose of the
law is to persuade humanity of its fallible, “glassy essence” (2.2.127), by
revealing that redemption through grace is not something that individuals
deserve. The law, in other words, is not a fixed table of infractions and
punishments that makes it possible for men and women to sit in judge-
ment on one another’s souls, but a supple means to demonstrate that God
“ceaseth not . . . daily to fill heaven and earth with the rich treasures of
most free and undeserved grace” (Hooker 1989, 1.162–163). More directly,
everyone is guilty.
To be sure, Vincentio is no Prospero. The Duke’s deep studies do not
expose the fallibility of his own natural inclinations, but rather instruct
him in the corollary to the Calvinist superego, namely, that lenience is
equivalent to an instruction to trespass (1.5.35–39). In the schematism of
42
Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, 126.
the play, the Duke personifies “divine authority,” presenting a point for
the “intensification of identification accompanied by increased repression,”
supposed to resolve the crisis of symbolic authority by providing an ego
ideal capable of supervising generalised reconciliation. The universality of
depravity is evidenced by the guiltiness of everyone—including the idea
that desexualised denotation is a ruse for sexualised connotation, and the
results of Angelo, Claudio and Isabella’s inspection of the plenitude of filth
in their own hearts—something relentlessly staged Vincentio’s manipula-
tions of the action.
Against this scenario of recto and verso, the Duke’s philosophy—”be
absolute for death”—collapses ideal and drive at the point of inconsist-
ency. Critical commentary generally identifies the ducal ideology as
something extraordinarily philosophical, mainly because it is supposed
that his generalised repudiation of life is founded on a rejection of
sexuality.43 But in actuality, the Duke delights in staging the scene of
temptation and castration—the gaze enjoys—precisely because the
superego “knows more about it than the ego,” in an extraordinary series
of sexual manipulations (Angelo with Isabella; the “execution” of Clau-
dio; the “seduction” of Isabella; the marriage of Lucio). It is not that the
superego enjoys what is forbidden to the subject (here, Lucio completely
misunderstands the situation), but that the superego, by a reflexive
twist, enjoys the enforcement of that prohibition, its sadistic sexualiza-
tion and the sinister connection between formal legality and substantive
transgression.
The Duke embodies what Žižek refers to as “the properly perverse
attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the Other’s
Will.”44 It is this that generates the potential for the Duke to replicate
Angelo’s fall in relation to Isabella and makes the bed trick with Mariana
and his sudden marriage to Isabella appear coercive and deceitful rather
than reconciliatory and righteous. This happens when the reconciliatory
fantasy is stripped away, exposing the subject to the terrible abyss of the
desire of the Other. The ducal speech on “be[ing] absolute for death”
indicates not the embrace of death as a place beyond desire, but the desire
for death as the place of an absolute question regarding the intentions of
the Duke. Here, Calvin’s dark god of wrath surfaces by proxy in the Duke,
a figure who “would have dark deeds darkly answered” (3.2.154–156), in the
moment when the fantasy of immortality is rent by the “skyey influences”
43
See Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 2001.
44
Slavoj Žižek, “Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple,” Lacanian Ink (1997).
182 geoff boucher
that rain mortal agony (3.1.9) and the anxious questioning about whether
we might after all “lie in cold obstruction, to rot” (3.1.124). For the fact of
the matter is that the play’s intellectual set piece makes no mention
whatsoever of the salvation of the soul or the promise of redemption,
but takes it key from the new philosophy and the scepticism of Montaigne.
This moment—a ringing instant of spherical loss—is the moment of
tragicomedy:
Once life and the world as a whole are considered to be an enormous tragic
farce, “transcendental buffoonery,” to quote Friedrich Schlegel, the idea
suggests itself that this tragicomedy might be presided over by some god
for . . . amusement . . . The world appears as a “caprice of God” (Brentano)
and man as a marionette in a tragic farce of cosmic proportions. This god
might well be the “savage god” that Yeats spoke about . . . naming him the
patron of all future literature . . . metaphysical farce, farce for the cruel gods,
tragedy for man.45
W O RK S CI T ED
Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in
Shakespeare’s Plays: Hamlet to The Tempest. London & New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Calvin, Jean. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge.
4th ed. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Taboo of Virginity.” In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI. 191–208.
Guthke, Karl. Modern Tragicomedy: An Investigation into the Nature of the Genre.
New York: Random House, 1966.
Herrick, Marvin. Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France and
England. 2nd edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited with an Introduction by C. B. Macpherson.
London: Penguin, 1968.
Hooker, Richard. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Preface, Books I and VIII).
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989.
Huff, Peter. “Calvin and the Beasts.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
42, no. 1 (1999): 67–75.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin, 1989.
Westerink, Herman. The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and
Early Reformation Thought. London & New York: Routledge, 2012.
Wheeler, Richard. Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and
Counter-Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
45
Guthke, Modern Tragicomedy: An Investigation into the Nature of the Genre, 169.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality.
London & New York: Verso, 1994.
“Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple.” Lacanian Ink 13 (Fall 1998): 12–25.
The Plague of Fantasies. London & New York: Verso, 1997.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London & New
York: Verso, 1999.
chapter 10
Jane Austen’s wit-craft

Molly Anne Rothenberg
Introduction1
If wit is judged by how quickly one turns the tables, Austen wins top
honors for delivering punch and counterpunch at the same time in Emma.
Just when Emma displays her vaunted wit at Box Hill, Austen makes the
joke backfire on her – and on the reader – in a recognizably psychoanalytic
way. Recall that when Frank Churchill explains the terms of his entertain-
ment as requiring “one thing very clever. . .two things moderately clever,
or three things very dull indeed,” Miss Bates remarks in her usual self-
deprecating fashion that she will have no trouble contributing in the last
category.2 The narrator then makes the apparently neutral comment that
“Emma could not resist” a witty riposte: evidently, Emma is so quick-
witted that, seemingly before she herself knows it, she is cautioning Miss
Bates with “mock ceremony” that she will be “limited as to number – only
three things at once.”3 Because the narrator’s point of view seems so
completely convergent with the value Emma places on her own cleverness,
the reader may be tempted to forget that anyone is watching and therefore
judging Emma’s performance.4 But in context, the narrator’s comment on
Emma’s quick-wittedness also implicitly indicts her for an inability to
govern herself, an indictment that others will soon make explicit. At the
same time, we no sooner appreciate the wit in Emma’s quip than we
become complicit in her insult to the good-natured spinster. Rendered in
Austen’s signature free indirect discourse, the narrator’s statement presents
Emma as both the proud author of her clever witticisms and the unwitting
1
For Michael Holquist, who taught me how to enjoy the nonsense.
2 3
Jane Austen, Emma (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 275. Ibid., 277, 275.
4
It is impossible to discuss Austen’s style without recommending the brilliant analyses of Frances
Ferguson and D. A. Miller: their contributions to Austen studies cannot be overstated. See
Ferguson’s “Jane Austen, Emma and the Impact of Form,” in Modern Language Quarterly 61.1
(March 2000): 157–180; and Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton and Oxford:
184
Jane Austen’s wit-craft 185
pawn of her unconscious energies. This splitting of the subject into a
subject of the enunciation, the speaking subject, and a subject of the
enunciated, the one spoken about or spoken by, is the signal feature of
free indirect discourse. This stylistic technique, then, makes it possible for
the reader to encounter, or to ignore, the doubled nature of his or her own
subjectivity, that is, the unsettling truth that to be a subject is to find that
one’s meaning always resides outside one’s control.
This moment in the novel marks the crux in Emma’s transformation
from child to woman, promoting the self-analysis that ultimately leads to
her love match with Knightley. Yet isn’t it odd that Austen, renowned for
her wit, should make a (would-be) funny remark the occasion for criti-
cism essential to Emma’s Bildung? Why should comic wit be a privileged
mode for the author but denied to the character? What does Austen’s wit
have that Emma’s lacks? The obvious answer seems to be Knightley’s, that
Emma’s rank requires her to protect, not mock, the lowest ranking
member of the group. But that answer assumes that Emma has a duty
to Miss Bates simply on account of her relatively high position, an answer
that is at odds with Austen’s own purposes, as I will argue. This turning
point in Emma’s education is not an endorsement of the prevailing
hierarchy of social status and station-appropriate etiquette. Rather, the
problem with Emma’s wit is that she fails to recognize the superiority
of Miss Bates insofar as Miss Bates, as I will argue, is the exemplar of
egalitarianism in a highly stratified society. Far from schooling Emma in
the duties appropriate to her rank, Austen uses her wit-craft psychoana-
lytically to deflate the specific and paradoxical ego ideal that supports
the fantasy of aristocratic privilege at work in this society. The special
structure of free indirect discourse within which Austen deploys her wit
provides the mechanism for the traversal of that fantasy for any reader
who is paying attention.
Replete with riddles, charades, word games, and witty repartee, the novel
signals its participation in what I will call the “wit tradition” of Restoration
dramatic comedy. This genre’s distinctive character is the investigation of
what psychoanalysis now calls the vicissitudes of the subject as signifier.
Austen’s choice of Restoration comedy is directly related to the way that
dramatists of that period use wit to respond to the crises of aristocratic
authority, inaugurated by the Puritan rebellion and the beheading of
Charles I, because verbal play highlights the contingent link between
signifier and signified, and therefore can be employed to call into question
the stability of every system of signification, such as aristocratic privilege. In
engaging with this wit tradition, Austen follows the lead of Fanny Burney’s
186 molly anne rothenberg
Evelina, a novel composed of theatrical presentation and epistolarity that
recalls Restoration dramatic comedy in a narrative form, oscillating between
an objective and a partial point of view. Burney uses this structure to expose
the fantasies of ideality supposed to guarantee aristocratic privilege, giving
comic wit both psychoanalytic significance and ideological power. Austen
makes use of Burney’s invention to develop free indirect discourse, in which
the doubling of the speaking position produces a witty destabilization of the
ego ideal in one linguistic unit. In this way, Austen suggests an alternative
to the status hierarchy’s reliance on and denial of its paradoxical ego ideal,
which we can describe as the fantasy of an Other that superintends the entire
field of meaning as an all-powerful, self-sufficient entity while, at the same
time, depending upon the subject to remedy its own lack. Austen crafts her
alternative by enacting and exposing this paradox directly in the verbal
Möbius structure of style indirect libre.
Her witty disclosure of the subject’s relationship to the ego ideal as a
founding fantasy for both the subject and the social hierarchy corresponds
to a recent psychoanalytic account of comedy. Many psychoanalytic
considerations of comedy focus on how jokes make us laugh or on the
psychic function of wit, with Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious as the primary reference.5 However, an approach derived from
Lacan’s theory elaborated by Alenka Zupančič examines comedy as a
method for exposing the fantasmatic underpinnings of the subject of the
unconscious. Zupančič explains that comedy makes visible the Möbius
structure of the psyche, its reliance on a fantasy of an ego ideal that is
paradoxically both universal and singular. This fantasy finds its most overt
expression in aristocratic ideology and that the wit tradition explicitly plays
with that fantasy; the comedies of Burney and Austen enable their readers
to “traverse the fantasy” underpinning aristocratic privilege. In Burney’s
case, this traversal promotes a new standard of ideality – sentimental
5
Although most of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious taxonomizes particular forms of wit and
explains laughter in terms of the psychic economy of repression and inhibition, Freud also lays the
groundwork for considering wit as a way to expose the fantasy at the heart of subjectivity and social
status. For starters, he calls attention to wit’s Möbius structure: “The pleasure of the wit resulting
from such a ‘short-circuit’ appears greater the more remote and foreign the two series of ideas which
become related through the same word are to each other, or the greater the economy in thought
brought about by the technical means of wit.” He also considers wit to be “the most social of all those
psychic functions whose aim is to gain pleasure” in that “it often requires three persons” – the
wit producer, the object of ridicule, and the laughing spectator” [Sigmund Freud, Jokes and
Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1916),
www.bartleby.com/279.] In this essay, I am not concerned with distinguishing jokes from other
kinds of comedy nor do I try to explain how comedy provokes us to laugh.
virtue. For her part, Austen urges the traversal to promote a society based
on identification with the singular universal, what we know as love.
The paradoxical ego ideal

To grasp the links among comedy, (dis)identification with the ego ideal,
the Möbius structure of the subject, and aristocratic fantasies of innate
privilege, let’s recall that, in Lacan’s theory, the subject’s entry into
language adds a lack to the infant, so that it can experience itself as a
signifier for others. In this way, the meaning of the subject comes to reside
elsewhere than in the subject. The split between the immediacy of its pre-
subjectified state and its mediation through language – between Being and
Meaning – gives the subject the sense that some essential part of itself –
object a – has been taken from it. As result, the subject is driven to seek
out object a from an Other/ego ideal who, so the subject assumes, holds
the secret to its meaning, its identity. The ego ideal seems to wield what
Lacan calls “phallic” power, that is, the power to govern meaning by
affording (supposedly) universal and stable links between signifier and
signified. The child seeks to identify with this powerful Other by way of
a contingent signifier (usually some arbitrary feature of the father) known
as the unary trait, which provides an anchor in the sea of unmoored
signifiers. This signifier seems to guarantee access to the phallic power
held by the Other, a power accessed in fantasy by the subject’s identifica-
tion with the unary trait. While crucial for structuring the psyche, the
function of the unary trait as universal guarantor nonetheless is an illusion,
for its universality is inseparable from the contingency of its choice. The
signifier supposed to give the subject access to phallic power, then, exists as
both universal and particular, which means it can operate as a switchpoint
between identification and disindentification with the ego ideal.
Both identification and disidentification are necessary for subjectivation.
In the fantasy that the subject can affirm its meaning as absolute by
fulfilling the desire of the Other, the Other is cast in two different,
incompatible roles. In the first, the Other is a self-sufficient, absolute judge
of the subject’s ideality, confirming the subject’s possession of object a. In
the second, the Other’s interest in the subject or desire for the subject
signals that the Other is missing something, its own object a for which the
subject stands. This duality is necessary: if the Other is absolute (without
lack), it has no reason to attend to the subject, and if the Other is not
absolute (is lacking), its phallic ability to seal the subject to object a would
be in question. The Other is always fantasied to have these two mutually
incompatible qualities, although the contradiction must remain uncon-
scious in order to operate effectively. The subject’s fantasy continually has
to negotiate and deny this Möbius structure, in which one “Other” always
makes the other “Other” appear.6
The Lacanian approach to comedy underscores the presence of this
paradoxical Möbius structure at the heart of the subject. As Zupančič
explains, comedy materializes the split in the subject, rendering it into an
object with which comedy plays. To demonstrate how comedy makes
visible the fundamental fantasy, she begins with an “archetypal” comic
situation of a high-status person who slips and falls into a muddy puddle
but carries on as if nothing has happened,
a buffoonish baron who implacably believes in his aristocratic superiority,
although throughout the comedy he stumbles, so to speak, from one
muddy puddle to another.. . . [I]s it not only too obvious that the capital
human weakness here – what is most human, concrete, and realistic – is
precisely the baron’s unshakeable belief in himself and his own importance:
that is to say, his presumptuousness? This is the feature that makes him
“human,” not the fact that he falls into a muddy puddle.. . . what is really
funny and makes us laugh most in our archetypal (imaginary) comedy is
not simply that the baron falls into the puddle but, much more, that he
rises from it and goes about his business as if nothing has happened.. . .
[True comedy] does not try to seduce us into deceptive familiarity with the
fact that His Highness is also, at the same time, or “on the other hand,” as
human as the rest of us [but rather a] true comedy about a presumptuous
baron has to produce the following formula in all its materiality: an aristocrat
who believes that he is really and intrinsically an aristocrat is, in this very
belief, a common silly human. In other words: a true comedy about aristoc-
racy has to play its cards in such a way that the very universal aspect of this
concept produces its own humanity, corporeality, subjectivity.7
The real comic object, she argues, is this baron-ness – the phallic power
supposed to guarantee aristocratic superiority. The baron’s performance
makes both the absolute and the lacking nature of this Other visible as the
split internal to the muddy aristocrat. Whereas the aristocrat thinks we see
him as he wishes to be seen in his ideality – as a non-split subject – we see
that he believes in the idiotic fantasy that his innate superiority (identifi-
cation with the universal absolute Other) makes him the paragon of
desirability (identification with the lacking, desiring Other). That is, from
6
Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In. Kindle Edition (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press,
2008), 598. Zupančič also writes: “Comic procedure is a procedure designed to make us see the
impossible passage from one side to the other, or the impossible link between the two” (617–618).
7
Zupančič, The Odd One In, 316–351.
the comic perspective, it is “not the poor lunatic who mistakenly believes
he is a king” who makes us laugh, a fallible human pathetically aspiring to
the heights, but the king who believes himself to really be a king that
strikes us as comical.8 Comedy displays this belief in an Other presumed to
universally guarantee the subject’s identity as exempt from the vicissitudes
of the signifier, in order to show the dependency of the subject on this belief
in phallic power in its identification with the contingent unary trait. In this
way, comedy reveals the subject as hinge between universality and particu-
larity: to be human is to be a singular universal.
By bringing the singular universal to light, comedy offers the subject an
opportunity to change its relation to the Other and to object a: what
psychoanalysis calls the “traversal” of the fantasy of the absolute Other.
The traversal can take place only if the subject recognizes its fantasy as
such; conscious recognition that the unary trait is contingent makes it
possible to disidentify with the ego ideal. As Zupančič explains, in true
comedy “the ego-ideal itself turns out to be the partial (comical) object . . .
The ego-ideal directly is a human weakness – which is to say that, in this
kind of comedy, the process of identification with the partial feature is, by
virtue of its comic character, always also the process of disidentification.”9
The key to the traversal is the recognition of the paradoxical duality of the
Other, as both absolute and contingent ego ideal. In this way, the Other’s
omnipotence is subverted and the phallic power that the subject has
attributed to the Other, the power to cause the subject’s desire and deliver
object a, can be transferred back to the subject.
The ideal king of comedy

The quintessential example of a comic movement that works by destabil-
izing the identification with the ego ideal is Groucho Marx’s well-known
resignation from the Friar’s Club. Having pestered a reluctant Groucho
into joining them, the club members refuse to accept his initial reason for
resigning, demanding his “real” reason. He responds “I don’t want to
belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”10
8 9
Zupančič, The Odd One In, 354. Ibid., 354–356.
10
Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (New York: Bernard Geis, 1959), 321. As Richard Raskin notes,
Groucho reported in his biography, somewhat facetiously, that he imagined he would have deep
literary conversations with thoughtful people, only to discover “All-American bores which you
would instantly flee from if you weren’t trapped in a clubhouse” (320). For additional historical
information, allusions, and interpretations of Groucho’s joke, see Richard Raskin, “The Original
Function of Groucho Marx’s Resignation Joke.” www.16–9.dk/200702/side11_inenglish.htm.
Groucho’s comedy shares with Zupančič’s sight gag a focus on the fiction
of an absolute and universal status guaranteed by an omnipotent Other,
although, unlike the sight-gag, Groucho’s response does not represent the
comic movement as a performance. Instead, it forces its addressees – the
club members – to encounter the truth about their fundamental fantasy by
way of the linguistic distinction between the subject of enunciation and
the subject of the enunciated. Groucho’s genius is to create a sentence
structure that perfectly mimics the Möbius structure of the subject, which
compels its addressees to switch between identifying and disidentifying
with their ego ideal. Members of clubs like the Friar’s Club imagine that
membership confers a special status upon them, singling them out from
others who do not have the object a. The “club,” in actuality nothing more
than the aggregate of its members, seems to have an existence apart from
them, appearing epiphenomenally to function as the Other, the ego ideal
who “sees” this special object (“wit” in this case) in each member and
confers upon them the status of ideal ego, whereas the club consists of
nothing other than an interplay of mirroring, narcissistic regard that
creates the illusion of a group of special people.
Groucho’s resignation at first seems to signal his identification, as subject
of the enunciation, with the gate-keeping function of the ideal by excluding
one person, call him X, from the club, who simply does not measure up to
the Other’s standards: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept
X as a member.” But the club has accepted X as a member, so the Other’s
judgment must be questionable. Groucho in effect supplants the ego ideal
function by disclosing that the former ego ideal, the notional “club,” has
failed in its duties. Thus, Groucho presents the ego ideal as both absolute
and particular, ideal and debased. By inserting himself in the place of the
subject of the enunciated (X = “me”), Groucho creates a Möbius structure,
making it impossible to distinguish the ideal member (enunciation “I”) from
the debased member (enunciated “me”). In creating this irremediable in-
distinction in language, Groucho forces his addressees to misrecognize him:
he cannot be securely positioned in relation to them.
The misrecognition staged by the statement speaks directly to the club’s
initial misrecognition of Groucho as a member of the club. Groucho
returns their message: “This club is an illusory, debased ego ideal that
makes the mistake of selecting inferior wits. In joining this club, I am
imagined to be (reduced to) an inferior wit like you. I reject this ‘equality’
but I acknowledge that, to the extent that I remain a member, this
reduction takes place, not because I am in fact inferior, but because to
be a member means that one is asking to be seen as an idiot, that is, as one
who believes unwarrantedly in the power of a notional Other to perman-
ently establish one’s status as a wit.” The apparent self-deprecation in his
resignation discloses that Groucho actually considers himself to be superior
to the club members, if only because he doesn’t need the club-as-ego-ideal
to confirm his wit. He insists on his singularity and his ability to function
as his own cause of desire. In fact, thanks to the Möbius structure of
his statement, Groucho proves that he does not belong to the same club as
the others: it is as if he is saying, “I am the only member who realizes
that this is a club of idiots, and I, the only non-idiot, don’t want to be in
a club where I am misrecognized for an idiot by idiots who can’t tell
the difference between an idiot and a non-idiot.” The wittier the club
member, the more he will appreciate the trap Groucho’s statement creates
for him; the cleverer he is, the more he will be forced to recognize as idiotic
his position as member. Less witty members who cannot grasp what is
being done to them simply confirm their idiocy in believing in the fantasy
of the club’s phallic power. No club member, whether wit or idiot, can
beat Groucho at this game. It is no wonder that the actual addressees
accepted his resignation without further question.
By identifying with the ego-ideal in order to exclude himself, Groucho
confirms its standard of witty ideality, but as an included member of the
club, he is in a position to see that the standard does nothing to guarantee
the wit of the members, and in no way corresponds to the image that
the club members have of it. The unary trait which is supposed to
guarantee their phallic power turns out to be the very trait that confirms
the club members’ lack of phallic power. Groucho subverts the (presumed
absolute) universality of the ego ideal by inserting the material element it
has supposedly excluded from itself: the Möbius structure shows that the
inclusion of the particular (Groucho as “me”) is in fact always a feature of
the universal. The ego ideal both loses and preserves its ideality by virtue of
this inclusion. By contrast, Groucho has traversed the fantasy that his split
can be or even needs to be remedied by an Other.
The restoration wit tradition

In both the sight-gag and Groucho’s linguistic double inscription of the
subject, comedy calls attention to a fantasy involving the subject’s per-
formance of ideality for an Other, a fantasy that represses the subject’s
awareness of its own Möbius structure. This denial is at the heart of all
status hierarchies, the paradigm of which is hereditary privilege: the
aristocracy is the ne plus ultra of clubs. Like the subject’s fantasy that the
ego’s natural ideality attracts the desire of the Other, the system of aristocratic
privilege explicitly asserts that the king is just naturally king, deserving of
universal regard. In psychoanalytic terms, comedy discloses the fantasy that
obscures the mirroring of narcissistic regard (“I recognize you as the kind of
person I would like to recognize me as your ideal”) and the performance of
status at work in both subjectivation and aristocratic anointing.11
Because this fantasy requires that the subject remain unaware that it is in
fact performing in order to solicit the regard it pretends to have naturally,
it is well-suited to drama for representing and exposing its operations.
Thanks to the isomorphism of aristocratic ideology and the subject’s
fundamental fantasy, works that interrogate the belief in hereditary privil-
ege also illuminate the psychic structure of the subject. Dramatists of the
English Restoration develop a specific type of dramatic comedy – the
comedy of wit – that is particularly apt for this purpose, exploiting wit’s
experimentation with the loose links between signifier and signified.
Exemplified in an unprecedented explosion of comedic writing expert in
verbal ingenuity – the extended analogical conceit, the pun, the epigram,
the travesty, the lampoon, the table-turner and its stichomythic extension,
repartee – wit plays with the signifier, switching between levels of universal
and particular, and, devastatingly, calling attention to the subject’s status as
signifier. Wit’s verbal play mirrors the appropriability of the subject as
signifier, the source of the subject’s estrangement from itself. In his famous
1693 quotation, Dryden (the era’s most prominent dramatist and wit)
demonstrates that the sign of true wit is its manipulation of dramatic
structure to expose the split in the subject to the gaze of the world:
How easie is it to call Rogue and Villain, and that wittily! But how hard to
make a Man appear a Fool, a Blockhead, or a Knave, without using any of
those opprobrious terms! . . . This is the Mystery of that Noble Trade,
which yet no Master can teach to his Apprentice.. . . a Man is secretly
wounded, and though he be not sensible himself, yet the malicious World
will find it for him: yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly
Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the Head
from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place.12
11
The original Jewish joke from which Groucho’s derives has the same structure “Every day in a coffee
house, two Jews sit and play cards. One day they quarrel and Moritz furiously shouts at his friend:
‘What kind of a guy can you be if you sit down every evening playing cards with a fellow who sits
down to play cards with a guy like you!’” (Reik, Jewish Wit, 1962, 57–58, qtd. in Richard Raskin,
“The Original Function of Groucho Marx’s Resignation Joke.”
12
John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693. http://en.wikiquote
.org/wiki/John_Dryden
Dryden’s beheaded man is a figure for the schism between subject and
object a produced by the signifier: by linguistically adding a lack to the
person, the fine stroke of the witty signifier, the subject’s true condition –
as split between meaning (head) and being (body) – becomes visible to
others. Wit reveals that what is most essential to the subject – its object a –
has its origin and significance elsewhere than the subject.
Once the monarchy is restored and Charles II re-opens the theaters,
Restoration playwrights eager to signal their royalist loyalties imitate both
the wit and the sexual license of their predecessors. For these writers, wit
signifies innate aristocratic privilege. As Robert Markley has argued, the
plays teem with characters like Truewit, Witwoud, and Witling whose
theatrical value is calibrated to their particular “inborn” rank as exemplified
by their wit.13 At the same time, the increasing influence of commercial
wealth brings the question of aristocratic privilege into public debate, while
the crises of monarchical authority inaugurated by the Puritan rebellion
and exacerbated by the beheading of Charles I, the Exclusion Crisis, and
the “Glorious Revolution” make visible the notionality of phallic power.14
In using wit to affirm aristocratic ideology, the theater nonetheless brings
to light the operations that authorize status, not by representing political
events but by exposing, however unwittingly, the illusory nature of phallic
13
Markley’s Two-Edg’d Weapons makes this argument throughout, referencing the major Cavalier and
Restoration dramatists. See Robert Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies
of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
14
The wit comedies’ attack on the phallic signifier threatens the Symbolic order. This threat calls for a
defense. Locke’s famous definition distinguishing wit from judgment seeks to establish a more
secure link between (one kind of) language and knowledge, that is, to set up an ego ideal against
which failures can be measured.
“And hence perhaps may be given some reason of that common observation – that men who have
a great deal of wit, and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason.
For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety,
wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and
agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating
carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being
misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite
contrary to metaphor and allusion; wherein for the most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry
of wit, which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore is so acceptable to all people, because its
beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labor of thought to examine what truth or
reason there is in it. The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of
the picture and the gaiety of the fancy.”
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XI.2. http://
enlightenment.supersaturated.com/johnlocke/BOOKIIChapterXI.html
Perhaps because satire implicitly proposes such a standard, it becomes the preferred comedic
mode in the Augustan era. Wit’s ironizing power, however, continues to spread. As the eighteenth-
century novel develops, it draws emphatically on the wit tradition, often destabilizing the judgments
on which satire relies, as in Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and even Richardson’s
Clarissa, which presents both a deceptively witty and a plain-dealing view of language and identity.
power and materializing the hinge between the corporeal body and sym-
bolic identity – that is, the singular universal. Originally used as an
epistemological tool designed to prop up claims of innate aristocratic
superiority during this period of repeated crises of investiture, wit’s pro-
pensity to ironic destabilization ultimately makes it an instrument of
epistemological questioning.15
Burney’s narrative invention

Although much Restoration drama is staged well into the eighteenth
century, the wit tradition continues most powerfully in the novel. Fanny
Burney, a devotee of Restoration comedy and a close reader of novels,
began her writing career with the comic novel Evelina (1778), shortly to be
followed by her play The Witlings, the title of which testifies to her
continued commitment to the seventeenth-century wit tradition.16
Repeatedly referring to its dramatic sources, the novel is organized into
five acts and canvasses a variety of Restoration comic types and modes,
from practical jokes, pratfalls, and lecherous buffoonery to mistaken
identities and pretensions of rank, in a hierarchy of wit keyed to social
class; Evelina, a late eighteenth-century heroine, even attends Congreve’s
1695 Love for Love. As in the Restoration plays, Burney establishes a
hierarchy of wit: the novel’s cast of characters is replete with innocents,
dullards, fools, plain dealers, witwouds, licentious wits, and experts at
irony. Like many eighteenth-century novelists, Burney continues the
Restoration experiment with wit’s ability to guarantee aristocratic carriage,
as her plot concerns the insecurities of Evelina’s position until her birth-
right is restored by her aristocratic father and her engagement to the
virtuous Lord Orville is secured.
15
For example, William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1695) dissolves the weld of signifier to signified
completely. Notably, the designation “plain dealer,” which heretofore had warranted the stability of
the signifier/signified link, loses its meaning; see Robert Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and
Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, 160. As wit comedy becomes
increasingly sophisticated about the instability of the signifier, wit becomes the means not only
for demonstrating that the subject is a signifier for other signifiers but also that manipulation of the
signifier is the actual key to social success.
16
James E. Evans and Francesca Saggini have each discussed Burney’s engagement with Restoration
drama. Evans makes an excellent case for the importance of Congreve for Burney in “Evelina, Rustic
Girls in Congreve and Abington, and Surrogation in the 1770s,” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation 52.2 (Spring 2011): 157–171. Saggini focuses on the Burney’s dramatic structure in
“Teaching Evelina as a Dramatic Text” in Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and
Eighteenth Century, eds. Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs (New York: MLA, 2010).
The threat wit poses to systems of signification – and the fun one can
have with this threat – intensively explored by the later Restoration
dramatists appears here as well: Evelina is always in danger of mis-
interpretation in society because she behaves according to the conventions
of sentimental virtue but is interpreted, usually willfully, according to the
conventions of aristocratic carriage, as when Lord Merton or Sir Clement
Willoughby repeatedly assail her chastity. Even the virtuous Lord Orville
gets confused about whether Evelina’s actions are innocent or knowing. In
the contest between the two codes of behavior, in which sentimental virtue
seems vulnerable to the power of aristocratic licentiousness, Burney uses
the wit tradition against itself (yet another topos of Restoration drama) to
decisively undermine aristocratic ideology in favor of sensibility, which in
her hands means establishing a way to put a halt to ironic subversion:
sentimental virtue, she proposes, will always eventually provide the guar-
antee of sincerity. Inner intention will be intelligible by outer action,
deception and vice will always be recognized, and plain dealers will be
rewarded.
Nonetheless, perhaps due to the fact that ironic wit can never be perman-
ently stabilized, near the end of Evelina, Burney’s wit reveals the fantasy at
the heart of the system of aristocratic privilege. Her chosen instrument is an
exemplar of true wit, Mrs. Selwyn, Evelina’s chaperone. Cleverer than any of
the witwouds in the assembled company, Mrs. Selwyn takes on the lords
and gentlemen at her hostess’s home. In a scene that is explicit about wit’s
subversion of the ideology of hereditary status, Mrs. Selwyn wittily appro-
priates the signifier as the weapon of exposure. Mr. Coverley and his
aristocratic friend, the lecherous Lord Merton, have accidentally crashed
their phaetons into each other, exposing them both to ridicule. The two
inveterate gamblers seek to restore face by betting on a phaeton race between
themselves. Mrs. Selwyn shows up the idiots involved in this wager, as
Evelina reports in this rather one-sided duel of wits:
“I shall now be entirely out of conceit with phaetons again,” said Mrs.
Selwyn, “though Lord Orville had almost reconciled me to them.”
“My Lord Orville!” cried the witty Mr. Coverley, “why, my Lord Orville is
as careful – egad, as careful as an old woman! Why, I’d drive a one-horse
cart against my Lord’s phaeton for a hundred guineas!”
This sally occasioned much laughter; for Mr. Coverley, I find, is regarded as
a man of infinite humor.
“Perhaps, Sir, “said Mrs. Selwyn, “you have not discovered the reason my
Lord Orville is so careful?”
“Why, no, Ma’am; I must own I never heard any particular reason for it.”
“Why then, Sir, I’ll tell it you; and I believe you will confess it to be very
particular; his Lordship’s friends are not yet tired of him.”
Lord Orville laughed and bowed. Mr. Coverley, a little confused, turned to
Lord Merton, and said, “No foul play, my Lord! I remember your Lordship
recommended me to the notice of this lady the other morning, and, egad,
I believe you have been doing me the same office to-day.”
“Give you joy, Jack!” cried Lord Merton, with a loud laugh.17
Here wit is both the tool and the subject of analysis. Burney’s punctuation
calls attention to Coverley’s slow-wittedness, since the dash signals that he
has to think before making a feeble and hackneyed comparison insulting to
Mrs. Selwyn (the “old lady”), as she flags Coverley’s smug approval of his
own paltry wit (his first “egad”). Mrs. Selwyn’s wit exposes Mr. Coverley
not only as too stupid to realize that he is her target (“a little confused”)
but also as bereft of any real friends who would regret his injury in a
phaeton race – that is, for pretending to a social significance he simply does
not have. In repeating his word “particular,” Mrs. Selwyn plays on its
double meaning of “specific” (pertaining especially to Coverley) and “an
object of affectionate regard” (pertaining especially to Lord Orville).
Finally, Burney indicates Coverley’s doltishness in his having to rely on
Lord Merton’s laughter as a guide to Mrs. Selwyn’s wit.
Mrs. Selwyn’s sally discloses that Coverley is conceited on account of
illusory virtues that have no substance apart from the interplay of narcissistic
regard. Unwilling or unable to see himself in the light that (truly worthy)
others see him, he derives his sense of self-worth from the presumed regard
of (unworthy) others, which he interprets to mean that he is always seen as
he wishes to be seen. Burney makes Evelina’s apparently innocuous remark
about Coverley’s “infinite humor” tell against him and all those who regard
him as witty as a mistaken social judgment. Coverley apparently believes this
(illusory) regard to be a universal and correct assessment of his significance,
so much so that those who demur may be regarded safely as nobodies:
he doesn’t see Mrs. Selwyn, the “old lady,” as a threat but as a nuisance
whom Lord Merton can handle. As the embodiment of Zupančič’s
“buffoonish baron,” Coverley is made ridiculous by the very belief in
aristocratic superiority that he thinks protects him from exposure. The
elaborate theater of the fundamental fantasy which structures subjectivity
seems to grant the “privilege” to display oneself as naturally superior to
17
Frances Burney, Evelina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 287–288.
admiring eyes, in a simple confirmation of the fact of self-sufficiency, until
the (presumed) admiring regard of others threatens to expose the ego as
dependent on the gaze of the Other, as soliciting the regard that should be
due it naturally. At that point, the Other as the (supposed) universal
guarantee of the subject’s meaning appears as a particular Other desiring a
particular object a: an Other fantasied by a particular subject. In the Möbius
comic mode described by Zupančič, the singular universal materializes as
this particularity inherent to the Other’s universality.
Burney generates another ingenious Möbius structure to solve the prob-
lem of transferring dramatic wit into narrative by splitting Evelina into two
positions, the character acting in the scene and the letter-writer reporting the
scene. Despite knowing that we are reading letters, for large swathes of the
text we can easily lose sight of Evelina the letter-writer’s particular perspec-
tive, as it disappears into a kind of third-person omniscient report of what is
happening on the “stage” of her social world. By the same token, when the
letter-writer speaks directly about herself, her fears and her hopes, Evelina the
character acting on the social stage disappears. But the narratorial intrusion
in the Coverley passage – “Mr. Coverley, I find, is regarded as a man of
infinite humor” – offers a rare moment in which these two perspectives
appear simultaneously in a more complex, comedic relationship.
Here Burney deploys the wit tradition to go beyond presenting how
others use wit in their social performances. At this moment, Burney, like
Groucho, enacts the split in the subject in order to lure her readers into a
comedic play of identification and disidentification with the ego ideal.
In this sentence she establishes an undecidable relationship between the
points of view of the subject of the enunciation (“I find”) and the subject
of the enunciated (“Mr Coverley is regarded [by X] as a man of infinite
humor”). The passive construction makes it impossible to say whether
Evelina herself counts as X, that is, whether she includes herself in the
subject of the enunciated as sharing the general opinion of Coverley.
Ignorant of the ways of the world, Evelina might have no way of knowing
how wit operates or what qualifies as wit, which could lead her either to
under- or over-value Coverley’s wit. On the other hand, Evelina as subject
of the enunciation separates herself (“I”) from the vague subject of the
enunciated (“X”) when she distinguishes between the epistemological
status of “finding” and “regarding.” In this way, the sentence undermines
the general opinion of Coverley: whether it is correct, i.e., to be shared
universally, depends on whether the Other exists as absolute judge guar-
anteeing an accurate, objective assessment or simply as a mirage generated
by the interplay of social regard that obscures a partial Other. The
uncertainty of the identification of Evelina as subject of the enunciation
with Evelina as subject of the enunciated undermines the fantasy of an
absolute Other supposed to guarantee the general opinion of Coverley’s
wit. At the same time, the very sentence that appears to confirm Coverley’s
wit by social acclaim actually transfers the mantle of wit to Evelina the
narrator. The reader, then, is in a position to disidentify with the fantas-
matic ego-ideal of the superior aristocrat that is shared by the assembled
company. Evelina’s “finding” that the ego ideal is a matter of “regard”
rather than objectivity suggests a way to traverse that fantasy. Staging the
problem of wit’s destabilizing force – the problem of matching inner
intentions to outer action, of linking subject of enunciation with subject
of enunciated – Burney weights her sentence so that Evelina’s implicit
standard of sentimental virtue, in which the pure subject’s actions accur-
ately index her virtuous intentions, not only exposes the false standard of
the aristocratic ideal, ironizing its epistemological pretensions, but also sets
up a new ego ideal as a bulwark against ironic destabilization.
Austen’s wit-craft
Following Burney’s lead, Austen develops her own flexible narrative tech-
nique that enacts the split in the subject, thereby compelling the reader to
encounter the subject’s Möbius structure. I have already briefly outlined
the double viewpoint of “Emma could not resist,” which is similar to
Evelina’s statement judging Coverley’s wit, but other features of Emma’s
wit failure can help illuminate Austen’s strategy and purposes. Like Bur-
ney, Austen uses wit to undermine the fantasy supporting the aristocratic
status hierarchy, but where Burney sets up a new code of conduct –
sentimental virtue – as her barrier to wit’s ironizing power, Austen turns
to the isomorphism of that fantasy with that of the subject of the uncon-
scious to indicate how a more desirable society could be established
through encounters with Möbius subjectivity.
Like the Coverley episode, the scene at Box Hill not only displays wit
but also makes wit its topic. And like Burney, Austen uses the wit tradition
to show how the fantasy of privileged status renders the subject vulnerable
to ridicule: in both cases, wit is the means by which the subject performs
its special status as well as the mechanism exposing the fantasy of privilege.
Austen presents Emma as the typical buffoonish aristocrat, the queen of
her little world who has believed herself to be the queen – that is, who has
accepted without question that the social order automatically positions her
on top by virtue of some ineffable quality that she naturally possesses.
Emma’s resentment that Mrs. Elton, as a married woman, has taken over
the first rank from Emma in Highbury is only somewhat assuaged by
Frank’s assertion that Emma “wherever she is, presides,” an assertion
Austen counters with Mrs. Elton’s immediate – and legitimate – protest.18
In this scene, Emma continues to encourage Frank’s attention even as she
recognizes that “in the judgment of most people looking on it must have
had such an appearance as no English word but flirtation could very well
describe.. . . They were laying themselves open.”19 That is, we find Emma
at precisely the moment when basking in the regard of the Other is starting
to be experienced as being on display for the judgment of others. Emma
senses that being the center of attention makes her vulnerable to the charge
that she is soliciting attention, thereby revealing that she is a split subject,
not the ideal ego of her imaginings, for in the fantasy sustaining the ideal
ego, the subject assumes that it attracts the attention of the Other naturally
and effortlessly, simply by virtue of itself. Emma begins to discover that
there is nothing natural or automatic about the production of the ideal
ego: it requires the performance of whatever the ego imagines the Other
desires, a performance that could easily be rejected (or found tiresome) by
the Other.
In order to shift the group’s attention, Frank sets up the terms of the wit
entertainment: his requirement of “one thing very clever. . .two things
moderately clever, or three things very dull indeed” recalls the hierarchy
of wittiness borrowed from the Restoration wit tradition and Burney.20
But then a funny thing happens. The usually self-effacing and apparently
dim-witted Miss Bates takes up the challenge, rising to the occasion in
uncharacteristically concise and coherent comments:
“Oh! very well,” exclaimed Miss Bates, “then I need not be uneasy. ‘Three
things very dull indeed.’ That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure
to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I—(looking
round with the most good-humored dependence on every body’s assent)—
Do not you all think I shall?”
Emma could not resist.
“Ah! Ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me – but you will be
limited as to number – only three at once.”
Miss Bates, deceived by the mock ceremony of her manner, did not
immediately catch her meaning; but, when it burst on her, it could
not anger, though a slight blush showed that it could pain her.21
18 19 20 21
Austen, Emma, 274. Ibid., 273. Austen, Emma, 275. Ibid., 275.
Miss Bates, another “old lady,” demonstrates that she understands the risk
of wit contests very well. The witwoud always risks being seen as a dunce,
especially if he appears to be trying to be witty: wit should be effortless and
attention given without solicitation. Miss Bates uses the split between the
subject of the enunciated and subject of the enunciation to make herself
into a comic object, judging herself from the point of view of society’s ego
ideal and thus exposing her own Möbius subjectivity. In this way, she not
only joins the game but responds to Frank’s intentions to shift the uncom-
fortable focus away from the flirtation, acting as a true friend to Emma.
Now, readers trained by long passages of her inane chit-chat to judge
Miss Bates as insipid, repetitious, and ridiculous will likely miss the wit of
her sally. “As soon as [she opens] her mouth,” she does little more than
repeat what Frank said, a dull contribution it would seem, until we realize
that the repetition is an appropriation, signaling her participation in the
game and her desire to afford entertainment to the discerning (and perhaps
to take the heat off Emma). Her archness (“do not you all think I shall?”)
pre-empts her being viewed as a failed wit in the eyes of the discerning
spectator/reader, since she effortlessly entertains her audience with her
dullness. Miss Bates puts the usual view of herself as dull into virtual
quotation marks as a means of forcing others to take responsibility for their
judgment of her. “Looking round with the most good-humored depend-
ence on every body’s assent,” Miss Bates indicates that she is clever enough
to know how others view her, quoting what they think of her in order to
put them in the socially awkward position of not knowing whether to
take what she says as a joke. She is both joking and serious, soliciting assent
and calling for disagreement, dull and entertaining. Manipulating the
switchpoint afforded by her dual position as subject of the enunciation
and subject of the enunciated, Miss Bates makes herself the victim of her
own beheading and then turns the tables by demanding a response to her
little puzzle – can her audience find a way to agree with her without
insulting her? Does her audience appreciate her wit?
Unfortunately for Miss Bates as well as herself, Emma simply cannot
resist separating herself from the group of equals, the “all” of Miss Bates’
query: she cannot help trying to be the top wit. Emma’s desire to play the
queen overrides her judgment and ruins Frank’s and Miss Bates’ efforts to
create a different center of attention: despite her discomfort with being on
display, she cannot let even insignificant Miss Bates have the spotlight. In a
spectacular failure of wit, Emma makes an effort to trump Miss Bates’
contribution. She fails not only because her wit is so patently an attempt
(as the pause of “Emma could not resist” indicates) but also because she
does not understand that Miss Bates has set a clever puzzle, the solution of
which requires a delicate balancing act. Emma’s quip does technically
qualify as wit, for she has appropriated and re-signified “three” in an
unexpected way, yet because she is in effect disqualifying Miss Bates from
the entertainment altogether, she succeeds only in disclosing that she has
failed to understand that Miss Bates has already joined the game, i.e. used
her “dullness” to entertain her audience.
In this way, Austen plays a trick on her readers who think they have
taken Miss Bates’ measure as inferior to Emma, for she uses Miss Bates to
show how Emma is unworthy of the reader’s approbation and identifica-
tion insofar as she relies on the privilege of the status hierarchy. The time it
takes Miss Bates to catch Emma’s meaning has less to do with Emma’s
quick-wittedness than with Miss Bates’ difficulty believing that Emma has
not realized that she has been rescued from her precarious social position:
“I must make myself very disagreeable or she would not have said such a
thing to an old friend,” she says to Mr. Knightley in everyone’s hearing.22
It is worth remembering that Miss Bates is the character who comments
most frequently and at length on the way that the tiniest social obligations
ought to be performed and interpreted, albeit usually to deprecate herself:
the reminder of her friendship to Emma further depreciates Emma’s social
understanding. The proof of Emma’s wit-failure is that Miss Bates has just
made herself very agreeable, so her comment that “she must have made
herself very disagreeable” casts doubt on Emma’s ability to understand
what is going on socially. At the same time, Miss Bates is the opposite of
Dryden’s clueless beheaded man, for with this comment she shows that she
understands exactly what Emma is doing – using the most insignificant
person to elevate herself – and she makes sure that everyone present knows
it as well. In other words, Emma undergoes a Drydenian beheading at
Miss Bates’ hands.
Up to this point, Emma has been certain that the privileged status she
enjoys derives from an absolute, omniscient Other. Like an early Restor-
ation heroine, she imagines that her wit confirms her natural status and
exposes the pretensions of her inferiors. She disapproves of any social
mobility in Highbury, the world in which tradespeople like the Coles
can achieve high social status and even the apothecary, Mr. Perry, can buy
a carriage. She hasn’t tried to improve herself because she has come to
believe that her natural self is universally admired – or, if not, to assign any
deficit in admiration to a fault in the perceiver. In her fantasy, her
22
Austen, Emma, 323.
cleverness does not require development, her perspicacity is unquestioned,
her interpretations are always correct: she is always esteemed, and always
on account of her “natural” superiority, by the all-knowing Other who
gives its approval to her object a. But the Other as absolute, we must recall,
has no interest in or need of the subject, and therefore no “reason” to
provide access to object a: in order for the subject to imagine access to its
object a, the Other also has to desire the subject as its object a. The gaze of
the Other cannot neutrally superintend the field of the Symbolic: it has to
single out the subject. In other words, the Other has to be a Möbius
Other, particularized in relation to the subject while remaining universal.
The particular universal of love

When Knightley takes Emma to task for her treatment of Miss Bates,
he prompts Emma to transform her relationship to the Other – which is
to say to himself. For until her misstep, Emma has not known that
Mr. Knightley embodies the Other for her. Throughout the novel,
Knightley himself has repeatedly adopted a Möbius relationship to Emma,
at once the Other particularly interested in her and the one who represents
a neutral, universal viewpoint from which her faults are objectively dis-
played. Knightley makes Emma recognize that, thanks to her failure of wit,
the gap between the subject and object a has materialized: she has become
the comic object for others. This realization, along with the revelation of
Harriet’s certainty that Mr. Knightley has amorous intentions toward
herself, spurs Emma’s famous self-analysis:
How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practicing on herself,
and living under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and
heart! . . . To understand, thoroughly understand her own heart, was the
first endeavor . . . With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the
secret of everybody’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to
arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally
mistaken. . .23
Emma is not only “universally mistaken” but also mistaken about the
universal. Yet unlike the buffoonish baron or the dense Mr. Coverley,
Emma learns to recognize the gap between herself as ideal ego and as
lacking subject in the materialization of herself as comic object, when she
grasps the dual role that Mr. Knightley has played for her – as both
absolute universal and particular object of affection.
23
Austen, Emma, 307–308.
Past this point, we hear little of Emma’s cleverness. However, Austen is
not through with comedy. When Emma’s relationship to the ego ideal
changes, so does the reader’s. For the first time, Austen presents Knight-
ley’s thoughts in free indirect discourse, where his peculiarities, partialities,
mistakes in judgment, and jealous sufferings are on display. Knightley
becomes a comic focus when he is split between the voice of objective
judgment and the performance of partiality:
He had found her agitated and low. – Frank Churchill was a villain. – He
heard her declare that she had never loved him. Frank Churchill’s character
was not desperate. – She was his own Emma, by hand and word, when they
returned into the house; and if he could have thought of Frank Churchill
then, he might have deemed him a very good sort of fellow.24
Austen’s free indirect discourse collapses both universal and particular into the
same structure: once partiality is admitted, the judgment appears to be
correct; once universality is admitted, the judgment appears to be biased.
One leads directly to the other, since in fact they cannot be disimplicated. In
other words, the reader sees Knightley simultaneously as the ego ideal whose
standards are absolute and as a faulty, particular man. Here we must return to
Zupančič’s caution: Knightley does not inspire love on account of having
been exposed as merely a man rather than an absolute Other. Rather, Knight-
ley is lovable because he embodies the singular universal, materializing the
Möbius structure of the Other that makes a human being human, the very
revelation that comedy is designed to foster. When the reader realizes that
Knightley has the same faults that Emma has, judging situations according to
his emotional investments rather than objectively, she also realizes that
Knightley is the ideal man in his partiality for Emma. Putting her wit in the
service of the singular universal, Austen promotes the traversal of the fantasy
of an absolute Other, which Knightley has seemed to be, while retaining a link
to an Other with particular qualities and investments. We call this link love.
Austen’s use of the Restoration wit tradition channeled via Fanny
Burney dismantles the ideology of aristocratic privilege through the lin-
guistic structures characteristic of wit comedy in order to compel an
encounter with Möbius subjectivity. Her readers ought to be left in no
doubt that aristocratic ideology is based on a fantasy of a paradoxical
Other. Unlike Burney, Austen doesn’t propose replacing one absolute ego
ideal with another, the “guarantor” of aristocratic privilege with the “guar-
antor” of sentimental virtue. By the same token, Austen is no advocate of a
24
Austen, Emma, 322.
market-based or individualistic approach to social value. Instead, she pro-
poses identification with a different kind of ego ideal. The conclusion of the
novel unfavorably compares the status-conscious Mrs. Elton to the “small
band of true friends,” a final display of Austen’s comprehension of the
political possibilities in the wit tradition.25 In the Restoration, the conflict
between aristocratic ideology and new socioeconomic forces is managed
through denial, but in Austen’s era the groundlessness of aristocratic
superiority has come out into the open and the status hierarchy requires a
new justification. Austen herself is at pains to show her readers the defenses
that society mounts in order to disavow the ideological conflicts it is
enacting (hence the shifting links among fortune, rank, “breeding,” and
family origin that Austen’s work purposively displays).
If a society based on identification with an absolute ego ideal inevitably
causes inequality, power imbalances, and instability, what would a society
based on identification with the singular universal as its ego ideal look like?
Knightley serves this function for Emma, but I propose that Miss Bates
is the better model for Austen’s readers and the one that she intends for
the more discerning in her audience. Reading any speech by Miss Bates,
the reader meets characters who appear nowhere else in the novel: John
Saunders, who repairs eye glasses; Patty, the Bates’ housemaid; Mrs.
Wallis, the baker, and her boy; old John Abdy, her husband’s former
clerk, and his son, ostler and head man at the Crown; Mrs. Ford, wife of
the shop proprietor; a multitude of minor gentry – in fact, Miss Bates (like
the author) appears to know everyone. More importantly, she accords
everyone the same generosity as to their intentions and their manners that
she displayed toward Emma at Box Hill: “they are extremely obliging and
civil to us, the Wallises, always,”26 she says of the baker’s family, and of her
husband’s now elderly and impoverished clerk, “poor old John, I have a
great regard for him.. . .”27 While we modern readers tend to approve the
“democratic” impulse of Emma’s friendship with Harriet, the purpose is to
“elevate” Harriet; that is, Emma fully accepts the status assumptions of the
social hierarchy, which she can well afford to do because she is at the top.
Emma’s “equalizing” effect derives from her position: it is akin to, but
fundamentally different from, God’s position, which equalizes everyone by
virtue of His unassailable superiority. Emma, of course, is not God, and
the equality of favor she sometimes displays toward others (visiting the
needy or educating Harriet, but not, significantly, Jane Fairfax) always
smacks of noblesse oblige. Even Knightley, who has a better claim on our
25 26 27
Austen, Emma, 360. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 285.
admiration due to his efforts to be fair and objective, affirms superiority
of class and considers it his duty to tender respect to his inferiors. By
contrast, Miss Bates, who Möbius-like resides at the border between the
gentry and the lower classes (and as singular universal is positioned with
the all-powerful author while remaining a minor character), actually acts
according to principles of equality unknown to Emma. While fully cognizant
that a status system is in place, she subverts it by treating everyone above and
beneath her with exactly the same respect and admiration. Miss Bates’s
version of equality does not depend upon someone occupying the “God”
position in order to equalize the rest. Her strategy is the opposite: a Groucho-
like self-deprecation that, instead of creating a club of one, creates a club of
everyone. We can better envision such a society thanks to our encounter
with the singular universal in Austen’s Möbius comedy of manners.
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
Burney, Frances. Evelina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Dryden, John. A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693).
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dryden
Evans, James. “Evelina, Rustic Girls in Congreve and Abington, and Surrogation
in the 1770s.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52.2 (Spring
2011): 157–171.
Ferguson, Frances. “Jane Austen, Emma and the Impact of Form.” Modern
Language Quarterly 61.1 (March 2000): 157–180.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by A. A.
Brill. New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1916. www.bartleby.com/279.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II, Chapter XI.2.
http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/johnlocke/BOOKIIChapterXI.html.
Markley, Robert. Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of
Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Marx, Groucho. Groucho and Me. New York: Bernard Geis, 1959.
Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, of the Secret of Style. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
Raskin, Richard. “The Original Function of Groucho Marx’s Resignation Joke.”
www.16–9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm.
Saggini, Francesca. “Teaching Evelina as a Dramatic Text.” In Teaching British
Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. Edited by
Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs. New York: MLA, 2010.
Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In. Kindle Edition. Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 2008.
chapter 11
The perambulatory process

Eros, wit and society-testing in Henry James’s
“The Chaperon”
Sigi Jöttkandt
“A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later one takes a cab.” In Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud uses this somewhat ano-
dyne joke to illustrate the part played by the comic in the unconscious.
According to Freud, jokes function in ways not unlike dreams to permit a
repressed idea to gain admittance into consciousness. As with dreams,
various techniques are available to the unconscious for this “joke work.”
These include faulty reasoning, substitution by the opposite, unification,
rediscovery of the familiar, representation by absurdity and “indirect”
representation. In the latter, a forbidden idea breaks into the minds of
hearers through an indirect allusion, catching a ride along a different
thought pathway to prevent interception by criticism. A joke can thus
serve as an “envelope” for thoughts of great significance, Freud main-
tains.1 Enclosed in the joke, an objectionable idea succeeds in by-passing
the censorship of repression to deliver a forbidden pleasure to the listener.
It is this technique that the umbrella joke employs, for instance. Freud
explains:
One marries in order to protect oneself against the temptations of sensual-
ity, but it turns out nevertheless that marriage does not allow of the
satisfaction of needs that are somewhat stronger than usual. In just the
same way, one takes an umbrella [. . .] to protect oneself from the rain and
nevertheless gets wet in the rain. In both cases one must look around for a
stronger protection: in the latter case one must take a public vehicle, and in
the former a woman who is accessible in return for money.2
Like many of the jokes Freud cites in his monograph, the wife–umbrella
joke shields its listener from any discomfort that an overt statement of the
hidden idea might produce, while still permitting the pleasure associated
with that idea to emerge: “One does not venture to declare aloud and
1
Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in the Standard Edition 8 (1905), 92.
2
Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 111.
206
The perambulatory process: Eros, wit and society-testing 207
openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s
sexuality,” Freud clarifies. The joke’s power “lies in the fact that nevertheless –
in all kinds of roundabout ways – it has declared it.”3 Protecting forbidden
sequences of words and thoughts, jokes thus offer shelter from the storm of
criticism, providing a sort of public vehicle – a cab – in which outcast ideas
may hitch a ride back into circulation.
There are few figures in literature who have spent as many hours waiting
for a hansom cab as James’s exquisite Mrs. Tramore, the anti-heroine of
James’s short story, “The Chaperon,” which first appeared in The Atlantic
Monthly in 1891. Mrs. Tramore threw over her – why not admit it? – bore
of a husband to follow her lover abroad. Unhappily for her, this lover
drowned in a boating accident in the Mediterranean before he could make
good on his promise of marriage. But rather than bury herself quietly on
the Continent like a good “heroine of a scandal,” this indefatigable lady
insisted upon returning to London, draped in a mourning that, as James
tells us, “only made her deviation more public, she was a widow whose
husband was awkwardly alive.”4 Ensconced in a “beautiful little wasted
drawing-room” in Chester Square, Mrs. Tramore spends the best part of
her middle age sitting on the sofa, poised in the “attitude of waiting for
the carriage,” which, given the snobbery of London society, will never call
for her.5
Mrs. Tramore might well have spent the rest of her life vainly nursing
her “one passion,” “the desire to go out,” were it not for a remarkable idea
conceived by her daughter Rose.6 The revealed “chaperon” of the story’s
title, Rose elects, against all family and worldly pressures, to “go” to her
mother in a heroic gesture that ultimately pays great dividends. For through
this action, Rose engineers sufficient respectability for Mrs. Tramore to
re-enter society, and the two become a huge hit in the houses of the
London gentry that season.
How does Rose achieve this surprising turn of events? It is by means of
a tactic that would be familiar to readers of Freud’s joke book. With a
persistence bordering on the obdurate, Rose takes the rules and familial
obligations of society so literally that, unless the entire social system is to
collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, London has no other
choice than to readmit her wayward mother. Furthermore, the way Rose
accomplishes this is nothing if not witty: in the most sanguine of ways, she
3
Ibid.
4
Henry James, Collected Stories, ed. John Bayley (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1999), 1186.
5 6
Ibid. Henry James, Collected Stories, 1187.
208 sigi jöttkandt
coolly behaves as though there is nothing more natural in the world,
nothing that society could not approve of more – and nothing that would
offend commonsense less – than for a daughter to return to her beloved
mother’s house after the death of a dearly loved father. And in close
keeping with society’s mores, which dictate that a young unmarried
woman may not go out alone but must always be accompanied by a
married lady, Rose declines every invitation to go out and dine (including
to Lady Maresfield’s sister’s coveted ball) because these fail to be extended
also to her mother who, most properly, would be expected to accompany
her as her chaperon.
Thus Rose sees off Lady Maresfield’s coveted invitation, “we shall be
delighted to come if you’ll ask us,” Rose smiled.
Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, and she was
a woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert. “I’m sure Guy is
longing for another dance with you,” she rejoined, with the most
unblinking irrelevance.
“I’m afraid we’re not dancing again quite yet,” said Rose, glancing at her
mother’s exposed shoulders, but speaking as if they were muffled in crape.7
In the same refractory spirit, Rose’s door remains shut to the Honour-
able Guy Mangler’s repeated assaults. “If you’ll accept me they’ll call,” the
“large and pink” son of Lady Maresfield seems to intimate, “but they won’t
call without something ‘down’.” In the face of this delightful prospect,
Rose remains nonetheless unmoved: “[T]he next time he came the door
was closed to him and the next and the next.”8 Similarly, to the “poor but
honest” Mrs. Donovan’s repeated entreaties, Rose is equally impassive:
‘I go out with my mother’, said Rose, after a moment. [. . .] ‘She goes
everywhere she wants to go’, Rose continued, uttering the biggest fib of her
life and only regretting it should be wasted on Mrs Donovan.9
Still, despite her brave show, one would be wrong to assume that
carrying out her grand “idea” is without trials. Very quickly, in fact, Rose
finds that “[f]ighting society was quite as hard as her grandmother had said
it would be.”10 Sitting with her mother in their unfrequented parlour, with
only the “new American books” for instructive company (for she wanted
“to see how girls got on by themselves”), Rose is attuned to a high tension
that made “the dreariness vibrate – the dreariness of such a winter as she
had just passed.”11 Nevertheless, by the end of the tale, the two ladies’
7 8 9 10
Henry James, Collected Stories, 1184. Ibid., 1194. Ibid., 1190. Ibid., 1186.
11
Ibid.
excessive propriety achieves its end. Although initially society’s renewed
interest in the Tramores is merely salacious, the day when Mrs. Tramore
became “valued principally as a memento of one of the prettiest episodes in
the annals of London” was soon to dawn.12
Even from this much too cursory account of James’s delightfully comic
tale, it is clear that, through a brilliant act of wit, Rose has played a
remarkable joke on society. And despite being the butt of her joke, London
cannot help but be amused. How she performs this feat is as follows. Rose
avenges the insult to her mother by cleverly exploiting something that
cannot be directly said, namely, in Freud’s words, that “marriage is not
an arrangement calculated to satisfy a [wo]man’s sexuality.”13 Rather than
declaring this openly, however, and risking the displeasure this statement
would bring, Rose shelters this idea under a second idea, namely, that a
young unmarried woman should always be chaperoned by a married lady
who will protect her sexual virtue. Clearly, the key to the joke lies in its
reversal of mother and child’s attendant positions for, while appearing to
seek refuge in her mother’s house, it is of course not her mother but Rose
who plays the part of the chaperon. It is this reversal of roles that triggers
the charge of the story’s title with the full, explosive force of James’s wit.
Deriving from the French chape, the word chaperon invokes in a cotermin-
ous manner the idea of a hood or cape. Thus as she drapes her mother’s all-
too-bare head with the sanctimonious mantle of society’s conventional
dictates, Rose cunningly exploits the “protection” that traditional wisdom
propounds regarding unmarried women for her own ends: if London is to
keep professing its sententious ideas about unmarried women, it is simul-
taneously obliged to accept the hidden idea contained in Rose’s seemingly
entirely uncontentious choice of chaperon, namely that women, just like
men, are sexual beings and that they, too, enjoy their sexuality, which
may – or may not be – satisfied by marriage.
At this point it is important to recall how, as Freud observes in Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious, the success of a joke lies in its element of
unpredictability. Freud writes, “everything [. . .] that is really in the nature
of a joke arises from our surprise.”14 For Freud’s successor, Theodor Reik,
surprise is central to the efficacy of psychoanalysis. Surprise, according to
Reik, represents the degree of our resistance to the idea that, carried in the
joke, confronts the hearer like a long-lost relative returned to us in disguise.
Extrapolating from Freud’s comments in the joke book, Reik explains that
12 13
Ibid., 1206. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 111.
14
surprise “is an expression of our opposition to the demand that we
recognize something long known to us of which we have become uncon-
scious.”15 Yet with surprise there always comes risk, and this is also true for
the scenario of the joke. There is no guarantee that our “reconciliation”
with what has been cast out from consciousness will be a successful one,
and that the hearer will laugh with pleasure at being reunited with an
unconscious part of herself.
Correspondingly, Rose’s joke could also very well have fallen flat were it
not for the fortunate fact that Gwendolyn Vesey, London’s chief arbiter of
social mores, was, as James puts it, “awfully modern,” and therefore an
“immense improvement on the exploded science of her mother.”16 Gwen-
dolyn is able to see what a “draw” there would be in the comedy, “if
properly brought out, in the reversed positions of Mrs Tramore and Mrs
Tramore’s diplomatic daughter.”17 James tells us,
With a first-rate managerial eye [Gwendolyn] perceived that people would
flock into any room - and all the more into one of hers - to see Rose bring in
her dreadful mother. She treated the cream of English society to this
thrilling spectacle [. . .] when she once more ‘secured’ both the performers
for a week at Brimble. It made a hit on the spot, the very first evening - the
girl was felt to play her part so well. [. . .] Mrs Vesey had been the first to say
the girl was awfully original, but that became the general view.18
The upshot is that London society ends up holding up the umbrella, as
it were, for both of the Tramore ladies. Rose’s joke relies on the way that,
in order to keep up its pretensions concerning young women’s proper need
for a chaperon, London must also implicitly acquiesce to the unconscious
idea that this statement surreptitiously contains. Writ large in the figure of
the scandalous Mrs. Tramore, this is the idea that marriage is not an
arrangement calculated to satisfy either sex. One might say that, to the
extent Rose takes society’s explicit statements about young women’s need
for protection completely at face value when she proposes her mother as
her natural choice of chaperon, Mrs. Tramore’s astute daughter effectively
“over-identifies” with the conventional discourse, thus revealing the inevit-
able gap that separates what it is that people say and what everyone knows
everybody secretly does (or at least wants to do). Consequently, if
London’s own hidden “scandal” – that is, the unacknowledged gap
between what it says in public and what it does in private – is not to
come to light simultaneously, London must embrace both Rose and her
15
Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co., 1948), 247.
16 17 18
Henry James, Collected Stories, 1205. Ibid. Ibid.
mother under one and the same statement about accepted social mores. As
it accedes to the pleasure contained in Rose’s witty choice of chaperon,
London is forced to literally “smile” upon Mrs. Tramore’s transgression
while this adroit lady, taking full advantage of the protection that Rose and
her “fall guy,” society, offer, emerges victorious. Returning triumphantly
from the exile of her drawing room, Mrs. Tramore succeeds at last in
fulfilling her one abiding passion, the desire to “go out.”19 “No observer,”
James reflects at the end of the tale, “would have been acute enough to fix
exactly the moment at which the girl ceased to take out her mother and
began to be taken out by her.”20 Mrs. Tramore “has now so many places to
go to that she has almost no time to come to her daughter’s. She is, under
her son-in-law’s roof [for Rose has of course in the meantime married
happily], a brilliant but a rare apparition.”21
***
As we saw, both Freud and Reik perceived a use for wit and jokes in the
analytic situation. For Reik in particular, analytic interpretations possess an
“inner likeness” with jokes such that a genuine interpretation causes a
surprise in the listener that is comparable to a good joke. As Gilbert
Chaitin explains, for Reik a genuine interpretation “causes a shock in the
analysand because in it she suddenly confronts her hitherto ghostly
thoughts embodied in the material reality of the analyst’s utterance.” In
his fifth Seminar, The Formations of the Unconscious, Jacques Lacan further
develops the analogy between analysis and jokes by focusing on the
linguistic dimension they both share. In a key lesson of this seminar,
Lacan comments how we are “dupes” of our desire, which is well known
for playing cunning tricks on its unwitting victim. Each one of us is
continually fooled by what it is we think we desire. The reason for this
“miscognition,” as Lacan describes it, is that desire is formed in language
and is therefore intimately bound to the signifier. A moment later in his
seminar, Lacan reiterates this point: “you are yourself betrayed,” he says,
“in that your desire has slept with the signifier.”
What might Lacan mean by this? It is that desire is never “pure,” but is
always the “desire of the Other” in the French psychoanalyst’s famous
phrase. Desire is never our own but in fact comes from the Other, insofar
as this Other can be thought of as the treasury of signifiers. This is
an important point because it subtly breaks with Reik’s emphasis on
19 20 21
Henry James, Collected Stories, 1187. Ibid., 1206. Ibid., 1207.
anagnorisis or recognition in analysis. Lacan thus agrees with the later
Freud who was forced to revise his idea that analytic interpretation
required a confirmation from the analysand. While throughout his life
Freud continues to hold to the idea that analysis aims to enable the
analysand to recollect certain experiences and their affects that have been
forgotten, by the late 1930s he is considerably less sanguine about the
talking cure’s power to bring back to consciousness what has been
repressed. In his 1937 essay, “Constructions in Analysis,” Freud remarks,
for example, how,
The path that starts from the analyst’s construction ought to end in the
patient’s recollection; but it does not always lead so far. Quite often we do
not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed.
Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an
assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same
therapeutic result as a recaptured memory.22
Indeed, Freud notes in the same paper that verbal confirmation of an
interpretation is just as likely to be an expression of resistance as its
outright rejection. “The ‘Yes’ has no value,” he says “unless it is followed
by indirect confirmations, unless the patient, immediately after his ‘Yes,’
produces new memories which complete and extend the construction.”23
By extricating it from a scene of recognition, Freud thus removes analytic
interpretation from any lingering associations with what Lacan was subse-
quently to call the register of the Imaginary, with its emphasis on the
image, identification and specularity, and embeds it firmly in the Symbolic
realm of language and Law.
To fully understand the stakes of this move, we must focus our discus-
sion on the part played by language in Lacan’s conception of desire. We
just heard that for Lacan the signifier is intimately involved in the creation
of desire. A more precise formulation states that the signifier is constitutive
of desire. Just as there are no truly innocent young women in James’s
fiction, there are no unalloyed desires for the simple reason that desire is
engendered by the signifier. This signifier intervenes in the gratification of
every wish, ignominiously sticking its nose in between every demand and
its possible satisfaction like one of the “Schadchen” in Freud’s Jewish
marriage broker jokes. The result of this interference is that no amount
of vigilance on the part of repression’s “chaperon” can prevent the signifier
from having its way with desire because desire, by definition, is always
22
Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in the Standard Edition 23 (1937), 266.
23
Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” 262.
“cuckolded” in advance. In every aspect of its being, desire is riven by the
indestructible trace of the signifier that brought it into existence, guaran-
teeing that every potential object of satisfaction will always be found faulty
at some level, as humpbacked and unmarriageable as the prospective brides
in Freud’s jokes. The desiring refrain, “that’s not it” (ce n’est pas ça)
captures this failure exactly: at the precise moment when the object of
desire is about to be grasped, an inevitable gap opens up between our
expected enjoyment and what is actually attained. No empirical object
could possibly satisfy desire because what desire aims for – namely,
complete satisfaction – is a myth.
It is to the prehistory of the subject, as psychoanalysis conceptualizes it,
that we must turn in order to gain an understanding of why satisfaction is
so elusive. As Joan Copjec notes, one of the most profound insights of
psychoanalysis is its observation that, in her words, “we are born not into
an already constituted world that impinges on our senses to form percep-
tions, but in the wake of a primordial loss.”24 The name psychoanalysis
gives to this loss is the maternal body. One says that the maternal object
epitomizes an original experience of pleasure, although phrasing things in
this way may be a little misleading since Freud was always careful to qualify
that this object exists only under the condition of loss: the lost object has
no ontological existence prior to being missing. For Freud, it is the search
for the lost object that retroactively creates this object (as lost), necessitat-
ing that every time we think we have grasped it, it slips from our grasp,
compelling us always to seek it again in the shape of another representative
object, and another, and so forth.
In his 1925 essay, “Negation,” Freud develops this point. Here he
acquaints us with the fact that what we understand as the objectivity of
the world is in fact a secondary phenomenon. Our first experience is of the
unity of the self and the outside world:
The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the
first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the
capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been
perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object
having still to be there.25
In Freud’s account of the primary and secondary processes, we initially
react to internal tensions such as bodily needs through what is effectively a
24
Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 191.
25
Freud, “Negation,” in the Standard Edition 19 (1925), 237.
fantasmatic response. Experiencing tension as “Unlust” (unpleasure), we
provision ourselves with what we wish for in a hallucinatory manner, as a
“presentation” of thought. But as Freud notes, the inevitable failure of this
approach results in the creation of the reality principle. As he puts it in
“Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning” (1911),
“the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real
circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real
alteration in them.” Although we continue to respond to our needs in an
illusory manner, what we aim to change this time is not something in
ourselves but something in the outside world. As a consequence, our grasp
of reality always remains “necessarily shaky.”26 Ours is a “reality” in which
all objects retain something of the original hallucinatory quality, residues
of our first (failed) approach to wish fulfillment.
What is it that Freud is trying to signal with his emphasis on the
fantasmatic nature of reality? It is that, despite its being a “momentous
step,” far from its popular conception as a realistic adjustment to the harsh
facts of life, the reality principle or secondary process is no less “illusory” or
fantasmatic a response than the primary process or pleasure principle. Both
simply aim to return to the state of “psychical rest” that had been disturbed
by the internal tension, one seeking a direct path through hallucinatory
“thinking,” and the other through the roundabout but equally hallucin-
atory path of the waking dream we call “reality.” In each case, the aim of
Lust or “pleasure” (i.e. the absence of tension) is maintained. The differ-
ence resides simply in the delay the secondary process invokes, for, with
this, the subject merely gives up a “momentary pleasure, uncertain in its
results [. . .] in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a
later time.”27
Now, when Lacan reformulates the Freudian problematic of the lost
object in terms of language, he remains faithful to Freud’s insight in the
“Negation” essay that it is representation or “thinking” that is responsible
for separating the subject from its original enjoyment. For Lacan, too,
reality is not something that is already given, but emerges from a complex
process involving a subjective choice. This choice is what Lacan calls
“alienation” and, very briefly, it describes two alternatives to what the
subject experiences as a traumatic entry into language. In Lacan’s well-
known formulation, the subject is confronted with a “forced choice”
26
Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 192–193.
27
Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in the Standard Edition, 12
(1911), 218–219.
between being and thinking. All of us, to the extent that we are speaking
subjects, must once have chosen language and, consequently, relinquished
our being, understood in the sense of an original enjoyment that Lacan
names jouissance. Rather than being permanently lost to us, however, a
quota of our forsaken being or jouissance circulates in the realm of
thinking as an “objective correlative” of the subject, the haunting palpebral
after-image of the enjoyment we once had.
But of course we never “had” it. In Lacan, as in Freud, the lost object, or
object (a), is the off-cut of representational thinking. The (a) would be a
paradoxical object whose ontological status is immutably linked to the act
of choice through which we entered signification and language. What we
pursue, then, in our endless games of hide-and-seek with the object is in
fact a missing part of ourselves. A quota of jouissance persists in the
Symbolic as a “piece of ignorance that cannot be made good” and con-
tinues to pose the question of what one desires. The (a) would thus literally
be a “part”-object that came into existence only with our choice to become
speaking subjects.
It is in this sense that our desire “has slept with the signifier” in Lacan’s
memorable phrase. Prior to any possible satisfaction with our desired
object is that object’s earlier intimacy with the priapic cut of language.
As it slices us from our being, the cut of the signifier literally brings the
object – along with its depth-inducing layers of “reality” – into existence.
Like a medieval lord assuming his traditional “droit de seigneur,” the
signifier forces itself between us and everything we might desire, deflower-
ing in advance any object we try to pluck. Yet before we simply assume
that the game of desire is unfairly one-sided, a rigged affair in which the
“House always wins,” it is helpful to reconsider the part played by the
enjoyment we derive from jokes. Although, as we have seen, the signifier
perennially intervenes between us and our desired object, it nevertheless
also finds itself at times the unwitting means by which we obtain an
enjoyment that replicates that of a fully satisfied demand. In the joke, that
is, the tables are turned on the signifier and the monumental Symbolic
system exemplified in James’s short story as the House on “Hill Street”
that it supports.
To explain this, we return to Freud’s discussion of the joke work. A key
feature in all of the cases Freud examines is his contention that one’s
enjoyment of the joke travels by what he calls a “roundabout path.”28 Our
enjoyment of a joke derives partly from the way it permits an idea to escape
28
repression by “distracting” censorship’s attention. Some curiosity in the
joke’s expression – typically, as Freud tells us, in the wordplay elements
that constitute the joke – momentarily diverts the censor, relaxing the
“inhibitory cathexis” of repression to permit a discharge of pleasure. But
Freud then goes on to stipulate that our pleasure that comes from the
liberation of a forbidden idea is completed in the enjoyment of the other
person, in whose laughter we also obtain a pleasure, albeit in a “round-
about” sort of way. “A joke is thus a double-dealing rascal,” Freud explains,
“who serves two masters at once. Everything in jokes that is aimed at
gaining pleasure is calculated with an eye to the third person, as though
there were internal and insurmountable obstacles to it in the first
person.”29 He continues:
Our insight into the conditions for obtaining and discharging pleasure
which prevail in the third person enables us to infer as regards the first
person that in him the conditions for discharge are lacking and those for
obtaining pleasure only incompletely fulfilled. That being so, it cannot be
disputed that we supplement our pleasure by attaining the laughter that is
impossible for us by the roundabout path of the impression we have of the
person who has been made to laugh. As Dugas has put it, we laugh as it
were ‘par ricochet [on the rebound].’30
What is this “supplementary” pleasure we obtain by rebound through
the “third person”? Here again Lacan’s linguistic reformulation of the
Freudian problematic helps us to pinpoint more exactly what is at stake.
Freud’s “third person” is one possible name for what Lacan calls the Other
(although Lacan’s term also conveys considerably more than what is
encapsulated by Freud’s formulation here). This Other would appear to
be critical to the success of the joke. To explain this, recall how the
enjoyment of the joke always proceeds by way of a “roundabout” path.
But now we see that it does so by way of not one but two roundabout
paths. The first is through the detour that the forbidden idea takes. The
forbidden idea piggybacks along a different pathway, taking cover under
the “chaperon” of publicly acceptable thoughts to re-enter circulation. Yet
it appears that there is a certain enjoyment that comes simply from taking
this roundabout pathway itself, and this derives not simply from the joy of
having tricked repression’s censor to allow a repressed idea to surface. This
“supplementary” enjoyment obtains from what Freud called something in
the form of the joke’s “verbal expression,”31 namely, in the element of the
29 30
Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 155. Ibid., 156.
31
wordplay itself. It seems the enjoyment that obtains from the joke
re-evokes certain “libidinal pathways” along which pleasure once traveled
prior to the signifying cut dividing subject and object. This would be an
enjoyment anterior to any distinction between Lust and Unlust, pleasure
principle and reality principle, primary process and secondary process.
It is along these forgotten discharge pathways that the joke perambulates,
tracing pleasure’s steps along ancient Bahnungen that once carved their
anarchic ways across the psychical apparatus before repression shut
them down.
One might describe the supplementary enjoyment of jokes as an enjoy-
ment deriving from the signifier prior to its being brought into the service
of the Law. To put this differently, one could say that when our joke
causes the “third person” to smile, what we’ve effectively done is force the
Other to assent to the idea that every communication, every message,
essentially fails. And there is a specific pleasure, Lacan maintains, that
comes from tricking the Other into this admission. When we surprise the
Other with our joking play on words, we force it to ratify our message as
an interrupted message, that is, as saying “more” than can be stated
through the chain of signifiers. Producing a peculiar sort of happiness, a
kind of Schadenfreude at the failure of communication governed by the
signifier, this admission by the Other that there is something beyond what
can be signified coincides with what Lacan describes as the “necessary
condition for every satisfaction,” namely, the fact that “you are precisely
heard beyond what you say.”32
To close quickly now by reprising Freud’s joke, I would say that “the
signifier is like an umbrella. Sooner or later one makes a joke.” Although
the phallic signifier offers some degree of enjoyment through the bait and
switch games of desire, the “public vehicle” – the joke – provides a
“stronger measure of protection” against the inclement idea that “lan-
guage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy the subject’s sexuality.”
In the joke, all of the usual rules and protections afforded by repression
find themselves upended, turned against themselves, and the phallus is
tricked into acting as the agent – the pimp – of an archaic, infantile,
primordial satisfaction. Giving this satisfaction the name “jouissance,”
Lacan explains that the joke “restores its jouissance to the essentially
unsatisfied demand.”33 The joke resuscitates certain primordial pathways
32
Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:
du Seuil, 1998), lesson 8.1.58.
33
Ibid., lesson of 18.12.57.
of enjoyment that Freud surmises must have been trodden by the infant
during its earliest play with words as it learned to speak. This would be
the enjoyment of what Lacan labels the “pure signifier,”34 and what
James punningly names “(e)Ros et (r)Amour.”
W O RK S CI T ED
Chaitin, Gilbert. Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge
Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. In the Standard Edition 5: 339–630.
1900.
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In the Standard Edition 8: 1–247.
1905.
“On the Sexual Theories of Children.” In the Standard Edition 9. 209–226.
1908.
“Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” In the Standard
Edition 12: 213–226. 1911.
“Negation.” In the Standard Edition 19: 235–239. 1925.
“Constructions in Analysis.” In the Standard Edition 23: 257–269. 1937.
James, Henry. Collected Stories. Edited by John Bayley. London: David Campbell
Publishers, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: du Seuil, 1998.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 14: The Logic of the Phantasy. 1966–67.
Unpublished seminar.
Reik, Theodor. Listening with the Third Ear. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co.,
1948.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
34
Ibid., lesson of 4.12.57.
chapter 12
Power in the closet (and its coming out)

Alenka Zupančič
If there is genuine novelty in the psychoanalytic take on jokes and comedy,

it consists in recognizing them as the most spirited accomplices of the
unconscious, as belonging to its most prominent “formations.” This is the
logical result of the singularity of the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian
unconscious does not refer to something irrational or strange to the
thought process; on the contrary, the first Freudian lesson is that the
unconscious thinks. The unconscious does not refer to things inaccessible
to consciousness and does not mean the opposite of consciousness; it
rather refers to an active and ongoing process: the work of censorship,
substitution, and condensation when facing impossibility, conflict, dead-
lock, and impediment. Given that from the Lacanian perspective, social,
symbolic power is always related to the point of impossibility or deadlock
of the structure in which it appears, it is not surprising that power has
always been a prominent subject of comedy. Comedy adeptly lends itself
to a kind of spectral analysis of the workings of power, fuelled by its
own power as comedy. Sometimes, comedy can be subjected to the rules
of political correctness, and to its restrictions and boundaries. But this
overpowering of comedy – even when conducted with the best intentions –
cannot but kill it off, for one thing is sure: comedy either wins, when it has
the last word, or it simply isn’t comedy. This is the power of comedy.
In 1957/58, during his 5th seminar, The Formations of the Unconscious,
Lacan discusses comedy delivering an inspired commentary of Jean Genet’s
play The Balcony, which he reads as comedy of the perverse functioning of
power. The first version of the play was published in 1956, but there was
much discussion, opposition, and censorship surrounding its stage produc-
tion, which was delayed for several years.1 Lacan immediately recognized
the play as a masterpiece, and his commentary of it in his seminar was also
clearly an intervention into this heated discussion. At the same time it
1
The play was first shown in Paris only in 1960, under the direction of Peter Brook.
219
220 alenka zupančič
allowed him to illustrate a point concerning what he held to be the key
structural feature of comedy in general: the appearance of the phallus, the
comic “coming out” of the hidden signifier pertaining to the fundamental
structure of the symbolic order and to its power relations. As he puts it:
“Comedy assumes, collects, enjoys the relationship to an effect fundamen-
tally related to the signifying order, namely the appearance of (. . .) the
phallus.”2 Or, as he formulates this two years later in the Ethics seminar:
“The sphere of comedy is created by the presence at its center of a hidden
signifier, but that in the old Comedy is there in person, namely, the phallus.
Who cares if it is subsequently whisked away?”3 The connection between
comedy and the phallus is not Lacan’s invention; it is pointed out by
virtually all theoreticians and historians of comedy, especially with regard
to the origins of comedy and its beginnings.4 Lacan’s contribution is to
relate this comic usage of the phallic reference to his theory of the phallic
signifier or, more precisely, to his theory of the place and the office that this
signifier holds in the symbolic structure. To put it simply: the phallic
signifier is a tautological signifier that signifies nothing but that it signifies;
it functions as a hidden presupposition (and reference) of the signifying
order, guaranteeing its meaning. Comedy plays with this hidden presuppos-
ition in different ways, exploring the fundamental function of this presup-
position: the linking together of the field of signification and of the field of
desire. By making it appear on the stage – “in person” or in some other
way – comedy makes this presupposition a direct protagonist in the very
configuration of which it is a presupposition, hence the comic effect.
And, indeed, The Balcony is a most literal illustration of Lacan’s point.
A rather unexpected appearance of the phallus takes place at its comic
climax, and we will stop at this scene later on.
Recently, Alain Badiou has returned to this point concerning the
functioning of comedy and its political relevance in a most interesting
way, taking for his cue the same scene from The Balcony. What would be,
he asks, the phallic emblem, the “authentic symbol” of our present time?
With the help of Genet, Badiou aims at accomplishing the comic gesture
of making this symbol appear for what it is. He locates it in the word
“democracy” as it functions today. To be sure, the signifier “democracy”
itself is not in any way hidden; quite the contrary; what is hidden and
2
du Seuil, 1998), 262.
3
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Dennis
Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992), 314.
4
The phallus appeared in classical drama in the form of a comical prop.
Power in the closet (and its coming out) 221
made to appear by Badiou is its agency as “the phallus of our present time”
or, as he also puts it with a slightly different conceptual accent, our fetish.
“The emblem of the present time, its fetish, that which covers up the
naked power without image with a false image, is the word ‘democracy,’ of
which I’ve already given a precise and circumscribed definition. To be a
democrat is today a sentimental necessity. The brutal power destroying us
starts to be appreciated, even loved by everyone the moment it is covered
over by the word ‘democracy.’”5
In what follows, I will look at The Balcony from the perspective provided
by Lacan and Badiou’s readings, presenting some of their key points. I will
also propose a possible further twist of this perspective, where the emphasis
is not so much on the appearance of the phallic signifier, as it is on the
mode and logic of its appearance. In other words, I would claim that –
from a critical perspective – the task is not only to identify the phallic
symbol that different political and historical configurations use to exercise
their power, but that we also need to look at how exactly this symbol is
used as “cover” and means of this brutal power. What is the ideology of
appearance that sustains it? Looked at from this perspective, Genet’s play
already articulates quite neatly a very significant shift that occurred in the
modern workings of power, which concerns primarily the logic of its
appearance, and with it the way it engages and captivates us as subjects.
***
Here’s a brief summary of The Balcony:
Most of the action takes place in a high-end brothel. The madam, Irma,
casts, directs, and coordinates performances in this “house of illusions”
(maison d’illusions is one of the French names for a brothel). The brothel
has several “thematic studios” where clients can stage and satisfy their
particular fancies, while Irma watches through special observation devices.
Genet uses this setting to explore power roles in society. In the first few
scenes, “customers” assume the roles of a bishop who forgives a penitent, a
judge who punishes a thief, and a general who rides his horse. (The
emphasis in these scenes is exclusively on the ritual part of these acts and
on the corresponding insignia . . .) Meanwhile, a revolution is progressing
in the city and the occupants of the brothel anxiously await the arrival of
the Chief of Police, who turns out to be a key comic figure of the play.
Chantal, one of the prostitutes, has quit the brothel to embody the spirit of
5
Alain Badiou, Pornographie du temps présent (Paris: Fayard, 2013), 32.
the revolution. The Envoy from the Queen arrives and reveals that the
pillars of society (the Chief Justice, the Bishop, the General, etc.) have all
been killed in the uprising. Using the costumes and props in the brothel,
the customers’ roles are realized when they pose in public as the figures of
authority in a counter-revolutionary effort to restore order.
First of all, it would be wrong to see in this narrative arc of the play
something like a return to the original state, after the failed revolutionary
sequence. At the end, we are not exactly back where we started. The
previous order or regime of power is restored, true, but it is restored at the
price of some significant changes in its “representation.” In this respect,
Genet – undoubtedly inspired here by Nietzsche, one of his favourite
references – embarks on a theatrical reflection about the difference
between the old and the new masters (between the classical and the
modern figure of the master). In Lacanian vocabulary this would be a
reflection concerning the passage to a new regime of the master’s dis-
course. Anticipating a little, we could say that the failure of the revolution
is itself inscribed into the new regime of power, and it is inscribed in a way
that would be best encapsulated by the following thesis: our contempor-
ary power is by definition – or by structure – a restored power; it
functions as an always-already restored power. This can be discerned in
many of its aspects; on the level of its image, of its functioning, and in the
way in which it establishes and keeps a hold on us. Restored power loses
some of its glamour, but none of its vigour. No alternative is deemed
possible, because the historical failure of an “alternative” is made into a
structural failure: it becomes part of the “new order” as its always-already
failed alternative.
The first part of the play stages a powerful spectrum analysis of what we
could call the classical functioning of power via points of symbolic author-
ity. By its (psychoanalytic) definition symbolic authority comes from the
outside; it is largely independent of our forces and merits, as it transcends
any of its physical bearers. This is the story of “the king’s two bodies”
analysed by Kantorowicz, and beautifully encapsulated by the famous
verses from Hamlet: “The body is with the king, but the king is not with
the body.” This was part of legal doctrine. “The body is with the king”
means that the king, in his own body, can enforce the king’s laws; “but the
king is not with the body” means that you can’t stop obeying the king’s
laws when the king is dead, because the king is not just a body, but a
principle. “The king is a thing,” continues Hamlet, and Guildenstern takes
the bait, asking “A thing, my lord?” Upon which Hamlet delivers the punch
line, “Of nothing.” The king is a thing – of nothing. At stake in this very
precise formulation is of course not some wisdom about the nullity of being
(symbolic or real being); it is a genuinely comic punch line, pointing at the
very phallic appearance of the master.6 Traditional costumes and insignia of
power should be seen as springing from and belonging to this logic of power:
they dress up the nothingness at the heart of symbolic power – not so much
to hide it, but to make it appear and to glorify it. The shiny clothes are the
appearance of the nothing, and not simply its dissimulation.
The “masquerade” involved in the classical costumes of power is therefore
not simply the appearance/presentation of the king’s other (symbolic) body;
it is the clothing (and appearance) of the gap that separates the king’s two
bodies; it is clothing the void that is constitutive of power. The dressing up
of the “nothing” makes a king a king. This is the place of “masquerade,” as
well as the “phallic” moment of all symbolic power. This essential relation to
the nothing can also help us understand the fetishism attached to various
insignia of power: they are fascinating not simply because they represent
power, but because they represent the nothing at the core of power; they are
the closest thing to the void or lack constitutive of power. Paraphrasing
Freud’s theory of fetishism7 we could say that they are the last things we see
before the void at the very heart of symbolic power.
This is the constellation so dramatically presented and explored in the
first three scenes of Genet’s play, constructed around this topology,
making it visible. The Bishop, the Judge and the General that we see in
these scenes are customers who came to the brothel to enjoy the glittering
and empowering surface of nothing: robes, ornaments, laces, mitres, as
well as the gestures and phraseology related to the given symbolic func-
tions. They enjoy the pure signifying surface of power, sneaking under-
neath it during their time at the bordello. They enjoy – not power (or a
simulation/pretence of it), but literally its signifiers (insignia, ornaments),
enjoying them precisely in that they are detached from all reality.
Genet thus approaches the regime of power from an unexpected and
singular perspective: namely, and literally, from the point of view of the
enjoyment sticking to, “contaminating” the purely symbolic functions.
6
Lacan makes this point in his own commentary of Hamlet, in his 6th seminar, The Desire and Its
Interpretation. See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre VI. Le désir et son interprétation (Paris: Seuil
2013).
7
According to which the subject elevates, “makes the fetish of,” the last thing he happened to see
before he noticed the absence of the phallus (in a woman); and the fetish is that with the help of what
he can deny this absence, and continue to believe in the female phallus. See Sigmund Freud, ‘On
Fetishism’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other works, vol. 11
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984).
Or, as Lacan formulates the paradoxical question that functions as the
starting point of Genet’s play: “What can it really mean to enjoy one’s state
of being a bishop, a judge or a general?”8 This question, or rather the
perspective it introduces, is not obvious; it is Genet’s invention, idea. It is
not about denouncing or exposing the fact that the figures of symbolic
power enjoy its performance, Genet pursues a much more specific ques-
tion: what exactly does it mean to enjoy the state of being this or that
figure of power? Genet constructs this singular and surprising point of view
that enables what I called the “spectral analysis” of the classical metaphysic
of power accomplished by the first part of the play and it turns the
topology of power inside out, like a glove, making the gap, the interval
necessary for the functioning of symbolic power, strikingly visible. The
detachability of insignia (appearances) from the person supporting the
function related to them presupposes a distance, or a gap, between them.
This distance is the locus of enjoyment (as seen from the inside). And, in
a properly comical twist that logically follows, the existence of this enjoy-
ment and its relative autonomy becomes the very proof of our eventual
ascension to power (as seen from the “outside”). The proof that I am a
genuine figure of symbolic power is not that I enjoy it, but that others can
find enjoyment in dressing up in my symbolic function. If people come to
the bordello and ask to be dressed up in the insignia of the judge, so as to
extract the pure enjoyment of it, this means that “judge” is a genuine figure
of symbolic power. In the play this properly comical logic is spelled out
by the overwhelming and frustrating ambition of the Chief of Police
concerning precisely this point.
The Chief of Police is related to the bordello by his strong (albeit
platonic) relation with its Madam, Irma. And whenever he comes there,
he keeps nagging the girls whether any of their clients have asked to dress
up in his role, as the Chief of Police. This then is how he – rightfully, albeit
comically – perceives what makes power power: the proof that one is at
the peak of one’s symbolic power is that one appears in the gallery of roles
in a bordello, that one “makes it to the catalogue,” that people ask to be
your character. You made it – not when people want to be you, or your
symbolic function, but when, independently of who they are, they can
enjoy the state of being your symbolic function.
For this independence, autonomy of enjoyment is precisely the other
side of the autonomy of the signifier, and particularly of the master
signifier, which functions by definition as independent/severed from any
8
Lacan, Les formations de l’inconscient, 264.
chain of reasons. It is a definition of the master signifier that it is grounded
only in itself. (“It is so because it is so.”) And this “other side” is what is
used by Genet to demonstrate the logic and topology of symbolic power.
The effect is comical, yet it is important to stress that this comedy comes
from shifting the perspective from within the given configuration; it does
not take place by means of ridiculing it from the outside.
The Chief of Police thus wants to make it to the catalogue. He is
obsessed by this inquiry and his formulations are as explicit as they can be,
to the point of being almost theoretical. In response to being told that
nobody has yet asked to be dressed up like him, he responds: “(Very sadly)
Nobody yet! But I’ll make my image detach itself from me. I will make it
penetrate into your studios, force its way in . . .”9 And a bit later: “For
the time being, I have to act. Afterwards . . . Afterwards, things’ll run
themselves. My name will act in my place.”10 If his name (of the Chief of
Police) will act in his place, it means that it will ascend to the status of
a master signifier as it functions in the classical discourse of the master.
For this is, almost literally, how Lacan describes the configuration of the
latter: “In the master’s discourse, for instance, it is effectively impossible
that there be a master who makes the entire world function. Getting
people to work is even more tiring, if one really has to do it, than working
oneself. The master never does it. He gives a sign, the master signifier,
and everybody jumps.”11
One should perhaps point out here that, in the given context, things
like “name,” “symbolic function/role,” “sign,” “insignia” all appear in
their dimension of a master signifier, and thus as interchangeable. They
are not taken in their stronger conceptual sense in which we may find
important differences between them. The masquerade at stake is basically
that of putting on a master signifier in order to find the enjoyment it has
in store as a master signifier.
Things become even more explicit and crazy when the Chief of Police
discusses what his detachable image, his costume, his ornament, his insig-
nia will be when the moment finally arrives. He timidly reveals the
suggestion that’s been allegedly put to him, and which he approves of
despite its audacity (since he wants to “carry on the fight by boldness of
ideas as well”). He would appear “in the form of a gigantic phallus, a prick
9
Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 48.
10
Genet, The Balcony, 53.
11
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Russell Grigg (W.W. Norton & Co.: London & New York, 2007), 174.
of great stature,” more specifically, of his stature.12 This appearance of the
phallus is the comic climax of the play that both Lacan and Badiou focus
on in their readings, and which I mentioned at the beginning. The comedy
of his priapic stature continues with the discussion of its technicalities by
the three authorities: Will the Church have any objections? Should the
phallus be painted in national colours? . . .
As the other theme of the play starts to emerge, however, exposing the
shift in the functioning of power, this pure comedy is transformed into
something more sinister. As suggested earlier, we are not dealing simply
with a restoration of the same old order, but with a restoration that brings
us to a fundamentally different topology of power. Let us now take a look
at what this shift implies. After the pillars of society have all been killed in
the uprising, the regular customers in Irma’s “house of illusions” pose in
public (appearing on the balcony) as the figures of authority, in the
counter-revolutionary effort to restore order. The logic of this restoration
and the way it affects the previous logic of power enjoyed by these same
customers is what the second part of the play focuses on, presenting its
“spectral analysis” in turn.
The way the Judge, the Bishop, and the General describe this shift is
precise and elaborate: it concerns the change in the status of the “mas-
querade,” and therefore of the void so precious to them, constitutive of the
detachability of the appearances they enjoyed. This shift forces them to
turn away from the masquerade, come out of its closet, and invest their
functions. What is at stake here is not simply that their way of enjoying the
emblems of power will have to change, it is also something in these
emblems themselves and the way they carry and implement power that
will have to change. Here are two passages illustrative of this point:
THE BISHOP: It lies with us for this masquerade to change meaning. . . .
We must act fast, and with precision. No errors allowed. (With authority)
As for me, instead of being merely the symbolic head of the country’s
church, I’ve decided to become its actual head. Instead of blessing and
blessing until I’ve had my fill, I’m going to sign decrees and appoint priests.
The clergy is being organized. A basilica is under construction.13
...
(To the Chief of Police): we were able to be a general, judge and bishop
to the point of perfection and to the point of rapture! You tore us brutally
from that delicious, untroubled state. . . .We – magistrate, soldier, prelate –
we’re [now] going to act in such a way as to impoverish these ornaments
12 13
Genet, The Balcony, 78. Ibid., 72.
unceasingly! We are going to render them useful! But in order that they be
of use, and of use to us – since it’s your order that we’ve chosen to defend –
you must be the first to recognize them and pay homage to them.14
We find two crucial elements: The void, the nothing at the very heart of
the symbolic function will be filled in with their “physical” persons, precise
actions, measures, decrees, whereas the ornaments, the costumes, will be
impoverished and put to use. In other words, the efficiency of a pure sign
(the master signifier acting in their place) will be replaced by a ‘real’ action
and organization. The second element is the restored power based on
circular recognition and accompanied by a cynical awareness of all parties
that it is fake, that it is a game.
Let’s start with this last point, concerning the comedy of recognition
situated at the heart of power, as always-already restored power. Restor-
ation is shown to function as a structural platform of cynical knowledge
about how things really stand, integrating this knowledge into the struc-
ture itself. The Chief of Police knows that these men are not really a judge,
a bishop, and a general, but just happen to wear the appropriate clothes at
the critical moment. He despises them, but has to honor them if he is to
save the order upon which he depends for his own being. They know that
he knows and that his respect is self-interested. They also despise him, but
know that they need him.
To display symbolic authorities as props in a comedy staged in a brothel
does of course make a significant contribution to their degradation. Yet, as
Lacan rightly remarks, reducing power to this kind of pure comedy does
not prevent it from continuing to function.15 Rather on the contrary, our
contemporary era supplies plenty of evidence as to how general disillusion-
ment works perfectly in maintaining the status quo. We could even say
that the political game of late capitalism works not in spite of our disillu-
sionment, but precisely because of it. It works with the help of us
supposedly knowing all about this “dirty” game. This is why different
revelations and scandals do little to disturb it. What is repressed in this
functioning of power is not some knowledge, some content, but rather
the repression itself – the fact that, although everything can be out in the
open, repression still functions. This distinction between the repressed
content and the repression (i.e. the repressive process) was crucial for
Freud, helping him theorize how knowledge or awareness can in fact help
us maintain the repression: to know “what this is all about” can be a way of
not knowing it; it can be a perfect alibi for going on as if nothing
14 15
Ibid., 80. Lacan, Les formations de l’inconscient, 265.
happened. This is the structure that he analysed, for example, in his paper
“Verneinung,” where he writes that even if we know about and accept the
content of the repressed, “the repressive process itself is not yet removed
by this.”16 Repression remains operative even when we already know. The
contemporary form of ideology exploits this divergence between the
repressed content and the mechanism of repression fully: despite over-
whelming awareness of the repressed contents, it successfully hides the
mechanisms of social repression. Moreover, it hides these mechanisms
precisely by way of the display of their contents.
This brings us back to the other issue underlined by Genet indicating
the shift in the appearance of power: the impoverishment of its ornaments.
What exactly is at stake here? Badiou makes a very interesting remark
about this in his commentary on the play, relating it to our contemporary
predicament:
In Genet’s brothel one enjoyed in the tripartite structure of power: the
judge, the general, the bishop. The client who has surely already been
someone of importance, nevertheless dressed up there in an emblem of
society and enjoyed this image with the help of the prostitute. As always
when we are close to the realm of enjoyment, we are dealing with a practice
that is at the same time childish (disguising, obeying) and structural or
historical (the power’s disposition to adultery). Today this junction has
taken different forms, of course. It is almost impossible to “disguise”
oneself as anything whatsoever. We can of course imagine figures of show
business, of the apparatchik of power, of the star of human rights. But how
to disguise oneself? This is question, which introduces yet another one:
do these images have potential for enjoyment in store? Here we come
across a certain imaginary dimension of democracy. Democracy means
precisely that there are no costumes. Inequality has no costume any more.
There are huge, dramatic inequalities, but their laicization leaves them
without costume.17
This immediately reminds us of the contemporary figures of masters, or
what today we experience as “bosses.” It seems that the more power they
have and the more they are sure of it, the more casually they like to dress.
They prefer to avoid the comedy involved in wearing something like a
master’s costume. I would only add to Badiou’s point that the logic of
this shift is already there and staged in Genet’s play, in the way he displays
16
Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other works,
vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 438.
17
The quote is from the lecture that served as basis of Alain Bladiou’s Pornographie du temps présent. In
the published version the passage does not appear as such.
the re-instauration and reconfiguration of power. This is Genet’s aim
when he makes the Bishop say: “It lies with us for this masquerade to
change meaning.”18
We have a new kind of masks and costumes that say: look at us, we are no
longer masks and costumes, we don’t pretend to be anything, we are not
significant, just useful, plain clothes . . . In other words, it is important to see
how this is not a disappearing of masks and costumes, but a profound
change in their function: the emperor’s new clothes are designed for him to
appear naked. It is only through its ideological clothing that truth appears as
“naked.” Nakedness is today the most fashionable costume for dressing up
(repressing) the truth – it is a costume suggesting that there is no costume.
The new mask – ordinary clothes – now masks its own presence, and
thereby reduces appearance to a purely imaginary dimension, to an image
whose realism, is part of the image. In other words, we are dealing with a
new type of appearance or costume, which efficiently blocks – by its very
realism – the access to the gap that the principle of power relies on for its
functioning. This gap has not disappeared, on the contrary, it is wider than
ever, but it is also more inaccessible than ever, masked as it is under its own
shameless imaginary display.
This configuration is exactly what is announced at the end of Genet’s
play. What happens at the end is that somebody – none other than the
leader of the revolutionaries – finally comes to the brothel asking to play
the role of the Chief of Police. As one could expect, this produces some
excitement among the regular customers there, but it also seems to be
somehow anticipated by the Madame, since a new thematic studio is
already prepared for this occasion: the Mausoleum studio.19 The Chief of
Police thus finally makes it to the Pantheon of the contemporary brothel of
power. Yet what appears at that moment is not the phallic image discussed
earlier. The insignia, the detachable image that the Chief of Police gets
here is not the phallus (as the master’s costume par excellence), but
something that looks like its exact opposite. The new customer (Roger)
is dressed up exactly like the Chief of Police, and he castrates himself right
there, cutting it off, quite literally.
roger: If the brothel exists and if I’ve a right to go there, then I’ve a right to
lead the character I’ve chosen to the very limit of his destiny . . . no,
of mine . . . of merging his destiny with mine . . ..
18
Genet, The Balcony, 72.
19
Genet makes reference to the controversial “Valley of the Fallen,” the mausoleum built by Franco
in Spain.
carmen: Stop shouting, sir. All the studios are occupied. Come along . . . ..
(CARMEN tries to make him leave. She opens a door, then another,
then a third, unable to find the right one. ROGER takes out a knife
and, with his back to the audience, makes the gesture of castrating
himself.)20
How shall we read this scene? Lacan reads it as complementary to the
buffoonish appearance of the phallus in the comic scene discussed earlier:
castration restores the phallus to the function of pure signifier.21 One
should add, however, that in this restoration a shift appears, introducing
a new logic of power and of the master signifier that accompanies it. Here,
castration becomes the very image of the newly established space (studio)
of power, incorporated in its emblem, in its public appearance. Why and
how? When Roger says that he wants to “lead the character I’ve chosen to
the very limit of his destiny,” does this mean that he is about to “get to
him” with the act of castration, and that at the moment of this castration,
the Chief of Police meets his final destiny? Yes and no; certainly not in the
sense in which this would be the end of the Chief of Police and of his
power. This is quite clear in the way the Chief of Police, who watches the
scene of castration with others through one of Madame Irma’s observing
devices, comments on it:
the chief of police: (He places his hand on his fly, very visibly feels his balls
and, reassured, heaves a sigh.) Mine are here. So which of us is washed up?
He or I? Though my image be castrated in every brothel in the world,
I remain intact. Intact gentlemen.22
In what way then is the Chief of Police “lead to the limit of this destiny”?
Or, more, precisely, what is this destiny? A clear indication is provided by
the reference to the mausoleum, described in the play as the place where
“you don’t stop dying” and where “your image, like your name, reverber-
ates to infinity.”23 This impossibility of dying, this state of the undead is
what appears here as the limit of the restored power – yet a limit that
doesn’t end anything, but only reverberates in its empty infinity. It is an
end that never ends, an end that will go on forever.
The Chief of Police thus gets his insignia, his own detachable image,
yet the logic of this image is new and different. As he puts it himself:
whatever happens to this image can’t really affect him. This is certainly
20 21
Genet, The Balcony, 93. Lacan, Les formations de l’inconscient, 268.
22 23
Genet, The Balcony, 94. Ibid., 92.
different from the classical logic of symbolic power, where, for example,
to disgrace the king’s image was to disgrace the king himself. The new
logic is: Let the image be castrated in all possible ways, and meanwhile
I can do pretty much whatever I like. Moreover, I can do pretty much
whatever I like precisely because of, and with the help of, this new image.
Genet’s play illustrates how castration (its display) paradoxically func-
tions as the phallic emblem of our times, of modern power.
What is announced at the end of Genet’s play is the rise of the public
image of a castrated master/boss. In a strange reversal of the classical logic
of castration (as the means of acquiring access to symbolic power), it
involves a castration of the symbolic (public) image as a means of exercis-
ing and perpetuating one’s unlimited power. Nietzsche introduced this
rhetoric when he referred to the modern masters as castrated, but he was
also careful to point out that this appellation did not mean that they were
powerless. What was at stake was a switch to a different kind of power, one
in which castration actually becomes part of the public image. Rather than
simply hiding the workings of the actual brutal power, this public image
gives them their truly modern form, thereby capturing its subjects. The
displayed nakedness and castration (vulnerability) of the new masters is
designed to prevent us from grabbing their balls to make them answer for
what they are doing.
The shift in the appearance of power and the logic of its operation is also
relevant to the question of comedy. It is striking how rarely we encounter
contemporary comedies of power and how, when they exist, they mostly
poke fun of the remaining islands of the more classical, authoritarian
modes of power, of the old kind of masters and their ridiculous conduct.
These kinds of comedies, however, are not on the level of genuine comedy,
because they are out of pace with the present of what they are comically
treating.
Yet how could we create a comedy of power when its image, its
appearance, seems to blend in with its surroundings and become indistin-
guishable from them and even from its subjects? The answer is actually
quite simple and some comedies have already found it. It consists in taking
the realism, the realist image of modern power as appearance – not as a
false appearance (as opposed to truth) but as lure. A lure is something
captivating, something that makes us not see because it gives us something
to look at. In our case, it masks the weak point of the given structuring of
power by imitating the weak point itself. It makes us look at the imaginary
display of castration so that its symbolic efficiency (bound to repression)
remains all the more undisturbed. In Seminar XI Lacan introduced the
concept of the lure with reference to mimicry. Taking his cue from Roger
Caillois’ book on the subject, Méduse et compagnie, Lacan points out that
in mimicry the animal does not simply adapt to its surroundings by
imitating them, rather it imitates a stain of its surroundings. We could
say that the contemporary imagery of power is mimetic in precisely this
sense: it merges with the surrounding reality by imitating its stain; it gives
an image to its point of inconsistency while fully exploiting its inconsist-
ency. Power appears by flagging its point of difficulty, and in this way it
does something other than telling the truth: it lures us, forcing us to watch
and not to see.
This is what contemporary comedies know, or at least, should know.
Such is the case with Lars von Trier’s comedy The Boss of it All (2006), the
story of a boss and owner of an IT company. Ravn has been running his
company for some time with the help of a fiction he has invented. He has
invented a higher boss that he is supposedly subjected to himself. Ravn
made his employees believe that this “boss of it all” owns the company and
runs the business from the United States. This ruse made it possible for the
actual boss, Ravn, to blame unpopular decisions on the higher boss, while
preserving himself as the image of good and gentle “bear,” who genuinely
loves and cares for his employees. The scheme works perfectly well until
Ravn decides to sell the company to an Icelandic businessman, at which
point he needs to produce his fiction, the boss of it all, to sign the deal.
He hires an avant-garde actor to play the part, and the comedy begins.
It is clear how the fiction of the “boss of it all” is needed for the actual
boss to merge with his surroundings, to function as part of the office, as
everybody’s buddy, in the same boat with them. It is also a fiction that
casts him as a castrated boss – someone not only unable to make any
important decisions by himself, but also a weak person who desperately
needs to be loved by everyone. Ravn doesn’t lose any opportunity to
display this weakness, and his pretending is not so much a false appear-
ance as it is a lure.
Benjamin Noys, in his commentary on the film, makes an excellent
point relating this configuration to the well-known claim by Lacan,
according to which “the Other does not exist.” The usual adjoin to this
thesis consists in pointing out that despite its nonexistence, the Other has
considerable material effects where it does exist. Benjamin Noys adds a
crucial further twist here, which resonates perfectly with what we have
been developing so far, namely: “it is not despite its nonexistence, but
because of its nonexistence that the Other has material effects. This lesson
is one that is rather difficult to learn; it appears that we remain all too ready
to believe that there is no “boss of it all” really, and it may take a comedy to
teach us differently.”24 The Boss of It All is precisely such a comedy.
As spectators, we know from the very start that there is no boss of it
all really, and that such a boss is just Ravn’s invention, one designed to
help him get what he coldly wants, while at the same time protecting his
own sentimental image of himself and satisfying his need to be loved
by everyone. We think we get the picture, and we think that all that is
needed is for the employees to get the picture too, to learn about Ravn’s
scheme and manipulations. And it is here that the final twist of the movie
awaits and surprises us. At some point the actor that Ravn hired to pose as
“the boss of it all” learns about the dark side of the deal – if the contract
is signed, everybody will lose his and her jobs and more. He starts
sabotaging Ravn’s plan, eventually tricking him to confess everything to
his employees – who instantly forgive him – not to sell the company. But
then comes the final twist. During the last meeting with the Icelandic
businessman, the actor finds out that the Icelander shares his own passion
for an obscure author called Gambini. He still has the power of attorney
and, on the spur of the moment, he signs the fatal contract, although
Ravn has already changed his mind and confessed everything. As a conse-
quence, everybody is sacked (except Ravn, of course, who also gets all the
money) . . . In other words, although everybody knows everything there is
to know, this does not prevent the mischievous deal from being concluded.
Such is the double lesson of this comedy about contemporary corporate
power: The Other who does not exist nevertheless has dramatic conse-
quences for our lives, and if it has such consequences, it is not because we
don’t know about its nonexistence or inconsistency, but precisely because
we know all about it. The brutal power destroying us starts to be appreci-
ated, even loved, by everyone the moment it presents itself in the mode of
castration. This castration is not simply a fake. It is real, yet it is instru-
mentalized as the very means of domination. Meanwhile, the Other who
does not exist is just getting richer and richer . . .
WORKS CITED
Badiou, Alain. Pornographie du temps present. Paris: Fayard, 2013.
Freud, Sigmund. “Negation.” In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id
and Other Works. Vol. 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
24
His paper ‘Outsourcing Authority’ has only been published so far in Slovene translation:
‘Outsourcanje avtoritete: o Glavnem šefu Larsa von Trierja’, Problemi 5–6 (2014), Ljubljana.
Genet, Jean. The Balcony. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove
Press, 1966.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1992.
Miller. Paris: du Seuil, 1998.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
Translated by Russell Grigg. W.W. Norton & Co.: London & New York,
2007.
Noys, Benjamin. “Outsourcanje avtoritete: o Glavnem šefu Larsa von Trierja,”
Problemi 5–6 (2014), Ljubljana.
part iii
He who laughs last, laughs last
Repetition, repetition, repetition
Richard Prince and the three r’s
Simon Critchley
Here’s one:
I’ve been married for thirty years and I’m still in love with the same woman.
If my wife ever finds out, she’ll kill me.
Here’s another one:
A husband comes home with a half gallon of ice cream and asks his wife if
she wants some.
“How hard is it?” She asks.
“About as hard as my dick,” he replies.
“OK, then pour me some.”
The only contribution America has made towards furniture is the
electric chair.
I always know when my sister’s having her period.
Because my father’s prick tastes funny.
A horse walks into a bar.
The bartender asks, “Hey, why the long face?”
“Doctor, my husband limps because his left leg is an inch shorter than his
right leg. What would you do in his case?” “Probably limp.”
A wife went in to see a therapist and said, “I’ve got a big problem doctor.
Every time we’re in bed and my husband climaxes, he lets out this ear-
splitting yell.” “My dear,” the shrink said, “that’s completely natural.
237
238 simon critchley
I don’t see what the problem is?” “The problem is,” she complained, “it
wakes me up.”
A guy falls out of the window of a twenty-storey building. As he passes the
fourteenth floor a friend yells, “Hey Mike, how’s it going?”
The way she looks in the morning! She ran after the garbage man and said,
“Am I too late for the garbage?” He said, “No, jump in.”
I could go on, but I won’t.
What interests me in these gags, which are lifted from Richard Prince’s
worknotes, is not just their hackneyed and slightly obscene quality –
although I am a lifelong devotee of the hackneyed and slightly obscene –
but their repetitive character. They are jokes that we have heard before. Or
even if we haven’t heard them before, we feel as if we have. They are
predictably familiar – maybe apart from the incest joke – and delightfully
retro-sexist. It is this familiarity that Prince is messing with when he
deploys them artistically, that is, when he repeats and reenacts them in
his work.
The jokes have a relentlessness about them, which is even sort of
desperate: here’s another one, here’s another one, and here’s another one:
I knew a guy who was so rich that he could ski uphill. Another one: I told
my mother-in-law “my house is your house.” Last week she sold it. Another
one: I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, “Tell me everything.” I did, and
now he’s doing my act. Another one: Oedipus, Schmoedipus, as long as he
loves his mother. Another one: a horse walks into a bar. I’ve told you that
already. OK. Two dogs go into a bar. Forget it. Another one: two nuns in
the bath. One says to the other, “Where’s the soap?” and the other replies,
“Yes it does, doesn’t it?” No one ever gets that gag. It’s the best one ever.
It is this “another one” character of jokes that interests me, this com-
pulsive repetitiveness. What I want to think about here, or begin to think
about, is repetition as the logic of the comic. Indeed, we might even want
to reverse that statement.
Let me say something slightly daft. I think that Richard Prince’s art is
governed by what Mark E. Smith of the mighty Fall calls the three Rs:
repetition, repetition, and repetition. As Smith says, “We dig repetition,
Chairman Mao digs repetition, President Carter digs repetition. We dig it.
We dig it.” My hunch is that Richard Prince, like Chairman Mao, digs
repetition.
Richard Prince and the three r’s 239
To say something even more general, in my view, art is a repetitive
mechanism that functions through theft, pilfering, sampling, forgery, and
copying. I think artists should continue to do what they have always done
so well: steal. Richard Prince is a great artist because he is a gracious thief,
an incurable and willful kleptomaniac.
But don’t get me wrong. If we ditch the romantic idea of art as
expression and originality and the artist as a radiant god-like genius
creating something ex nihilo, and embrace repetition as art’s defining
character, then doesn’t that mean that repetition is reduplication or the
eternal return of the same?
Not at all.
There is all the difference in the world in repetition. Or better: when
something is repeated, it is displaced, we might even say critically dis-
placed. The gags stolen by Prince in his work, lifted from the pages of The
New Yorker or wherever – these immensely comforting, complacent,
reactionary gags – are repeated and in that repetition their whole effect is
transformed, dismantled, and decomposed. If art is governed by the three
Rs of repetition, repetition, and repetition, then there is difference in
repetition, a critical difference. This is the difference that Prince’s work
opens up.
The sense of the comic that I am after is best articulated by the likes of
Bergson, Baudelaire, and (possibly) Yogi Bear. For Bergson, comedy lies in
the duplication that undermines uniqueness. Two similar faces, a repeated
action – these things are funny. For Baudelaire, it lies in a twofold fall: the
fall from the divine into the human and the pratfall. I watch another man
trip on the pavement and I laugh in sudden glory.
Baudelaire goes on to claim that what distinguishes the poet, artist, or
philosopher from others is that he can laugh at himself. That is, he can
simultaneously be the one who trips and the one who watches the trip: he
can split himself in two – what Baudelaire calls dédoublement, doubling –
which is not the capital city of Ireland, although Joyce makes this gag
repeatedly in Finnegans Wake. Indeed, the comic and psychotic repetitive-
ness of Finnegans Wake is on my mind here, and some of Prince’s late
paintings read like sentences from the book.
Yogi Bear just liked saying, “Hey there, Boo Boo.” But what is essential
is the difference in the repetition of the two “Boos.” It’s OK, I’m kidding.
So, the artist lives in doubling, in an act of duplication and repetition
that splits us in two; what I call in my ugly philosophical jargon a dividual.
Of course, once you’re split and reproduced you’re not unique anymore:
you’re fake.
240 simon critchley
This is an important point for me. The ironic self-awareness of the artist
and his or her audience can only be that of their own inauthenticity,
repeated at increasingly conscious levels. Think about Warhol’s reaction to
the trauma of being shot. He said, “Before I was shot, I suspected that
instead of living I’m just watching TV. Since being shot, I’m certain of it.”
If the core of art lies in repetition, then we can only relate to this
repetition inauthentically: doubled, split, fake, inhabiting a world that feels
unreal, the magical dance of commodities, celebrity, muscle cars, and pulp
fiction that we find in Richard Prince’s work.
Art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repeti-
tions and reenactments; fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in
which we live and confront us with the illusory character of reality.
We are returned from the illusion of reality to the reality of illusion.
This time I’m not kidding.
As Joyce realized in Finnegans Wake, literature is rich trash to be
recycled and adapted in a commodius vicus of recirculation. Yet, as Tom
McCarthy reminds us, there is always a remainder that remains in this
repetition: a shard, a leftover, a trace, a residue. This, I think, without
wanting to get too morbid, is the fact of our mortality: our mortal,
material remains, our death. And it is this relation to death that is in play
in humor.
In his stunning short paper on humor, Freud writes of a prisoner
condemned to be hanged. On the morning of his execution he is escorted
from his cell and led out to the courtyard. Seeing the gallows ahead, he
looks up at the sky and says, “Na, die Woche fängt gut an” – “Well,
the week’s beginning nicely.” Humor, in its morbidly comic repetition,
is the best expression of an ever-divided self-relation, of our essential lack
of self-coincidence.
In other words, I find myself ridiculous, which is to say that I do not
find my self, whatever that might mean, but rather see myself from outside
and laugh. This is what Beckett calls the “risus purus,” “the laugh laughing
at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word that
laugh that laughs – silence please – at that which is unhappy.” I hear this
laugh all over Richard Prince’s work.
Comedy confronts us with the painful reality of death. Tragedy does
this too, of course – but, whereas the tragic hero strides into death in
order to confer transcendent meaning on their life, the comic antihero
dies badly, incompletely. Wile E. Coyote gets blown up by dynamite and
falls off cliffs, Sylvester the Cat gets electrocuted and squashed by trucks,
but both come back and die again, and again and again. In tragedy,
Richard Prince and the three r’s 241
people die; in comedy they live. Ask yourself: which is funnier? As
Woody Allen said, comedy is tragedy plus time.
I want to push this theme of repetition and the comic a little further in
relation to Richard Prince’s later work. In addition to the relentless
repetition of retro-jokes that we all sort of know, there are repetitions
within jokes,
“I met my first girl. Her name was Sally. Was that a girl – was that a girl?
That’s what people kept asking. Kept asking.”
“I’m always kidding about my wife,” says the bartender. “Every time
I introduce her to anybody they say, ‘Are you kidding?’”
And so on.
What really interests me is the dismantling or decomposition of the joke in
some of Richard Prince’s later work, something that again happens
through repetition. In “Are you Richard?” from 2005, the text runs,
“I waited on the corner for my blind date. When this girl walked by, I said,
‘Are you Linda?’ She said, ‘Are you Richard?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘I’m
not Linda.’ I waited.”
We get the impression that the joke is on some sort of repetitive, endless
tape-loop, like Brian Eno’s Discreet Music from 1975, except a whole lot
funnier.
Or again, there are jokes where we are not sure whether they are jokes.
The jokiness of the joke is subjected to a sort of verbal atrophy or
subtraction. In “Oh Henry” from 2003, Prince’s text runs,
“Oh Henry let’s not park here. Oh Henry let’s not park. Oh Henry let’s
not. Oh Henry let’s. Oh Henry. Oh. Another one, Oh Henry let’s . . .”
Am I alone in finding the subtractive affect and effect of these gags to be
like reading bits of late Beckett? Beckett is all about repetition, of course:
Act two of Waiting for Godot is a repetition of Act One. Nothing happens.
Or almost nothing. Such is what defines tragicomedy, which perhaps goes
for Prince too. But there is a lyrical quality to these later works of Prince
that reminds me of some of Beckett’s late prose works and poetry.
Something else is happening, something elegiac and nostalgic which
I can’t quite put my finger on.
Much of Prince’s use of repetition lies in the production of what we
might call meta-jokes. A meta-joke is a joke that piggybacks on another
joke. A joke on a joke. For example,
242 simon critchley
“I’ll tell you one thing about German food. You eat it and an hour later
you’re hungry for power.”
This joke works because it presupposes the joke about Chinese food
leaving you hungry an hour after you eat it. Something akin to this
technique can be found in Prince’s “The Wrong Joke” from 1989,
“A traveling salesman’s car broke down one evening on a lonely road and he
asked at the only farmhouse in sight. ‘Can you put me up for the nite?’ ‘I
reckon I can,’ said the farmer. ‘But you’ll have to share the room with my
young son.’ ‘How about that!’ gasped the salesman. ‘I’m in the wrong
joke’.”
Indeed, we might perhaps say that Prince’s work is a series of wrong jokes,
of meta-jokes, of plays on joke form, jokes about jokes, the laugh laughing
at the laugh, the risus purus.
Trevor Griffiths once wrote, “A joke that feeds on ignorance starves its
audience.”1 Richard Prince’s jokes or meta-jokes do not starve their audi-
ence. On the contrary, through their relentless, repetitive character, they
make any easy laughter stick in our throats.
In this way, odd as it doubtless sounds, Prince’s work leads us to the
paradoxical core of the best humor: it is not funny. Rather, it is troubling,
unsettling, disorientating. The joke that you thought was about someone
else ends up reflexively rebounding on you.
In great humor, in my view, the joke is always on us. I think the best
humor implicates its audience. It grabs hold of us and refuses to let go. Any
laughter here sticks in our throats and we begin to choke.
Being by nature a cheapskate, I often eat in diners in Brooklyn and look at
the yellowing, dog-eared poster about applying “The Heimlich Maneuver” to
a choking person. Named after its inventor, Harry Heimlich, the maneuver
involves a powerful abdominal thrust that clears any obstruction to breathing.
Now, as I’m sure many of you know, the German word unheimlich
means something uncanny, not at home, strange or bizarre. At its best, as
for example in Richard Prince, art produces an unheimlich maneuver. We
experience the beautifully inauthentic repetitiveness of Prince’s work and
we begin to choke. Funny, isn’t it?
W O RK S CI T ED
Griffiths, Trevor. The Comedians. London: Faber and Faber, 1976.
1
Trevor Griffiths, The Comedians (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 23.
Index
Adelman, Janet, 176 Burney, Fanny, 19, 185–186, 194–198, 203

Adorno, Theodor W., 13–15 Evelina, 19, 186, 194–198
Albee, Edward, 159 The Witlings, 194
Allen, Woody, 8, 11, 17, 113, 241 Burton, Robert, 63
Althusser, Louis, 91, 96 Butler, Judith, 6
anhedonia, 19, 113, 125, 128
Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 82 Caillois, Roger, 232
annunciation scene, 31–32 Calvin, John, 157, 166–182
Aristophanes, 8, 10, 12, 136, 158–159 Camus, Albert, 66
Aristotle, 4, 64 Carracci, Annibale, 60
Arrabal, Fernando, 159 Carroll, Lewis, 16–17, 90
Assman, Jan, 28 Cassin, Barbara, 65, 66 n. 15, 67
Assoun, Paul-Laurent, 56 n. 51 castration, 16, 26, 28, 33–34, 56, 104, 174–175, 179,
Augustine, 168 229–231, 233
Austen, Jane, 19, 184–186, 198–205 catharsis, 10
Emma, 19, 184–185, 198–205 censorship, 2, 13, 79, 151, 206, 216, 219
automaton, 64 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 12, 94, 159
Avicenna, 117–118 Chaitin, Gilbert, 145, 148, 211
Chapsal, Madeleine, 36, 49
Badiou, Alain, 20, 67, 220–221, 226, 228 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 106
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12, 135 Charlie Hebdo, 21, 82
Bataille, George, 16 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 116, 119
Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 239 Chintio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), 159
Beckett, Samuel, 18, 20, 62, 71, 159, Churchill, Frank, 184
240–241 circumcision, 27–29
Benjamin, Walter, 13–14, 18, 91, 102 clinamen, 64
Bergson, Henri, 12, 20, 99, 239 comedy
Black Humor, 3, 117 death, 6, 8–9
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 95 desire, 11, 14, 16, 19, 136
Borges, Jorge Luis, 99 etymology, 13
Born, Bertran de, 46 love, 4–8, 134–154, 171, 173–176, 185, 187,
Bouasse, Henri, 51 202–203, 207–208
Boucher, Geoff, 19, 156–182 phallus, 7–8, 136
Božovič, Miran, 164 power, 219–220, 227, 230–232
Breuer, Josef, 153 Real, 9, 136
Breton, André, 3 talking cure, 1, 15, 136
brevity, 84–85 condensation, 16, 74, 76–81, 83, 90, 96, 104
Brooks, Mel, 8 Congreve, William, 13, 194
Brugghen, Hendrick ter, 60, 62 Cooper, Donald, 40
Bruyère, Jean de la, 11, 61 Copjec, Joan, 49 n. 32, 213, 214 n. 24
bungled act, 1, 51 Cotard, Jules, 115–116
243
244 Index
Cotard syndrome, 115–117 Ferenczi, Sándor, 18, 71, 99–100
courtly love, 48 Ferguson, Frances, 184 n. 4
Coyote, Wile E., 9, 20, 240 Fierens, Christian, 67
Coypel, Antoine, 61 Flaubert, Gustave, 2
cut (scansion), 3 Fletcher, John, 156, 159
Critchley, Simon, 20–21, 27, 120 n. 13, 121–123, Fliess, Wilhelm, 2
128, 237–242 Fo, Dario, 159
Cusanus, Nicholas, 54 Foucault, Michel, 96
cynicism, 63, 102 Fourier, Charles, 91–92
Freud, Sigmund, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 16–18, 26, 29, 34,
Damourette, Jacques, 67 37, 39, 55–56, 70–71, 73–80, 82–83, 85–88,
Dante, 48 90, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 113–115,
Dean, Tim, 57 119–120, 122–124, 128–129, 133, 136–137, 153,
democracy, 13, 82, 220–221, 228 160, 174–175, 179, 186, 206–207, 209,
Democritus, 18, 60–68 211–216, 223, 227
den, 64–68, 69 Civilization and its Discontents, 153
Descartes, René, 61 “Constructions in Analysis,” 212
desire, 2, 11, 14, 16, 19, 48, 49 n. 32, 78, 80, 97, “Formulations on the Two Principles of
105–106, 108, 110, 112, 123–124, 128–129, 136, Mental Functioning,” 214
146, 148, 153, 167, 172, 179, 181, 189, 192, 199, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1,
202, 211–213, 215, 217, 220 73, 82, 84, 136, 186, 206, 209
as cure, 123, 128–129 “Negation,” (Verneinung) 213–214, 228 n. 16
of the Other, 181, 187, 192, 211 “On Humor,” 114
disavowal, 56, 57 The Interpretation of Dreams, 73, 87
Disney, Walt, 13 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 73
Dolar, Madlen, 64, 67 “The Taboo of Virginity,” 172, 175 n. 39, 179
Douglas, Mary, 54 Freudian Slip, 1
Drach, Marcel, 18, 73–81 Frye, Herman Northrop, 12
Dragonetti, Roger, 45, 47
dream-work, 133, 138, 145, 150 Gai/gay savoir, 45, 47, 49, 55, 57
drive, 9, 19, 31, 47, 67, 78–79, 80–81, 105, jouissance, 48
108–109, 112, 114, 134, 137, 167–168, 170–171, Gandhi, Indira, 47
175 gaze, 178, 181, 192, 197, 202
Dryden, John, 192–193, 201 Genesis, 17, 26–28, 31
Dürenmatt, Friedrich, 159 Genet, Jean, 11, 20, 159, 219, 220, 222–225,
228–229, 231
Eastman, Max, 56 Gherovici, Patricia, 1–21, 60–71
Eco, Umberto, 16 Gide, André, 18, 97–99
ego ideal, 120–124, 127, 162–163, 174, 181, 185–191, Gide, Madeleine, 98
198, 200, 203–204 Giordano, Luca, 61
Eliot, T. S., 51 Goethe, Johann W., 90
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18, 43, 46 Faust, 90, 94–95, 106
Empson, William, 171 Gounod, Charles, 95
Engels, Friedrich, 92, 93, 95 Gracián, Baltasar, 53
Eno, Brian, 241 Griffiths, Trevor, 15, 242
Epicurus, 64 Groddeck, Georg, 71
Erasmus, Desiderius, 62 Grün, Karl, 91–92
Euripides, 158 Guthke, Karl, 158 n. 2
Guyotat, Pierre, 53
fantasy, 4, 67–71, 146, 160, 164, 173, 175–176, 181,
185–192, 195–196, 198–199, 201, 203 Heemskerck, Egbert van, the elder, 62
formula of, 67 Hegel, Georg, 10, 47, 50, 91–93, 97, 146
traversal of, 186–187, 189, 203 Heidegger, Martin, 108
Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 6 Heimlich, Harry, 242
Fechner, Gustav, 84, 102 Heine, Heinrich, 74–75, 90, 98
Index 245
Heraclitus, 60–62 Joyce, James, 18, 20, 53, 90, 239, 240
Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi), 95 Finnegans Wake, 239–240
Hippocrates, 62–64, 68, 116 Jöttkandt, Sigi, 20, 206–218
Hitchcock, Alfred, 146
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 93, 94 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 51, 93, 124
hommoinzun, 33 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 222
Hooker, Richard, 168, 180 Kaufman, Charlie, 115–116
Horace, 61 Kaufmann, Walter, 42
Horkheimer, Max, 14 Kavanagh, Patrick, 125
Huff, Peter, 169 Keaton, Buster, 9
Hugo, Victor, 66, 148 kleptomania, 18, 109, 239
humor, 1, 3, 11, 17–19, 21, 39, 54, 63, 82, 91–95, 99, Kubrick, Stanley, 12
102, 105, 107–112, 113–129, 173, 196–197,
240, 242 Lacan, Jacques, 2–7, 9–12, 14, 16–18, 20, 29,
absence (anhedonia), 113 36–41, 43, 46–47, 48–55, 57–58, 60–61,
Jewish, origins, 26–29 64–68, 73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 88–91, 95–100,
sadism, 104–106 106, 108, 112–113, 123–124, 136–137, 140,
superego, 114–115 143–145, 148, 151–154, 160, 169, 175, 186–187,
humors, 19, 63, 113, 116–120, 173 211–212, 214–218, 220–221, 224–227,
hysteria, 15, 52, 71, 96, 106 230–232
“Agency of the Letter,” 19, 33, 140, 145, 147
identification, 9, 15, 20, 141, 146, 152, 162, 169, Anxiety, 6
174–175, 181, 187–189 Encore, 26, 67, 80
Imaginary, 16, 29, 34, 108, 141, 143, 151–153, 157, Formations of the Unconscious, 10, 25, 29, 35, 51,
162–163, 167, 169–170, 175–178, 188, 212, 73, 97, 136, 145 n. 25, 151, 162, 211, 219
228–229 gaiety, 36–43
inhibition, 25, 34, 78–81, 83–84, 102, 186 “L’étourdit,” 48, 66–67
Ionesco, Eugene, 159 “Lituraterre,” 40
irony, 39, 56, 85, 91, 98, 123, 194 Moment to conclude, 6
My Teaching, 3
Jagger, Mick, 40, 41 On Transference, 5
Jakobson, Roman, 16, 18, 74, 76–81 Television, 38, 48, 52, 53, 60
James, Henry, 20, 207, 209, 210, 212, 215, 218 “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,
“The Chaperon,” 20, 207–213 or Reason Since Freud,” 19, 145
Jewish Humor, 2, 3, 18, 26, 29 The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique
Johnson, Ben, 13 of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, 10
Johnston, Adrian, 121 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 9, 10 n. 18–17, 136,
jouissance, 6, 10, 18–19, 26, 28–34, 48, 51, 60–61, 220 n. 3
67, 68–71, 73, 81, 96, 105, 106, 107–108, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
110–111, 113–115, 119–121, 123, 126, 128, 164, Psychoanalysis, 64, 65, 231–232
214–215, 217–218 “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the
surplus (plus de jouir, Mehrlust), 69, 73, 77, 80, Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” 50
96, 99 “The Function and Field of Speech and
joke, 1, 2, 9, 16, 34–35, 54, 206–207, 211, 215–218 Language in Psychoanalysis,” 47
concept joke (Gedankenwitz or Denkfehler), “Radiophonie,” 97
73–76 lack, 18, 26–28, 33–34, 110, 175–176, 187–188, 191,
condensation, 16, 74, 76–78, 80–81, 83, 90, 96, 193, 223, 240
148, 219 Laclau, Ernesto, 162
Democritus’, 66 Laing, Ronald, 40
economy, 76, 78, 82–91, 95–103 lalangue, 73, 77, 80, 81
enjoyment, 215–218 laughter
famillionaire, 74, 76–77, 80, 83, 90, 97 birth, 99–100
language, 4 capitalist’s, 88–91
phallus, 7 cure, 15–16, 63
sound joke (Klangwitz), 73–76 ego formation, 3
246 Index
laughter (cont.) Mouffe, Chantal, 162
femininity, 30–33 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 5
invention, 82
love making, 6, 13 Name-of-the-Father, 107, 146, 148–149, 175
phallic function, 33 ne explétif, 66–67
Real, 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 39, 42–43, 46, 55 n. 50,
truth, 16 57–58, 222, 231
Lefort, Claude, 162 Nobus, Dany, 18, 36–58
Leopold, David, 92 Noys, Benjamin, 232
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 61 Nussbaum, Martha, 153 n. 36.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 51, 77, 160
Leys d’Amors, 44–46 object a (object cause of desire, object (a)), 18,
Lichtenberg, Georg, 94 64–65, 67–68, 96–97, 176, 187, 189–190,
linguisterie, 138 193, 197, 202, 215
Locke, John, 193 n. 14 object lost, 67, 108, 176, 213–215
Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix, 62 Oedipus complex, 1, 7, 100, 134 n. 5, 136, 139, 146,
love, 4–7, 9, 12, 20, 45, 48, 57, 67, 82, 91–92, 174–176, 238
102–103, 107, 109, 113, 155, 125, 134–154, 161, Offray de la Mettrie, Julien, 61
171–176, 185, 187, 194, 202–204, 207–208, Onkelos, 30
221, 224, 232–233, 237–238 Overbeck, Franz, 55 n. 50
Lucretius, 64, 89 Owens, Carol, 19, 113–129
Luther, Martin, 166–167
Paul, Jean (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter),
Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 13 94
Mann, Horace, 61 n. 3 Pérez-Mora de Macias, Bianca, 40
Mannoni, Maud, 40 phallus, 7, 8, 10, 20, 26–28, 136, 174–175, 217,
Mannoni, Octave, 56 220–230
Marivaux, Pierre de, 4 phallic power, 11, 20, 34, 187–189, 191, 193, 220
Markley, Robert, 193 phallic signifier, 8, 136, 193, 217, 220–221, 225
Marx, Groucho, 6, 10, 14, 20, 95–96, 189–192, Pinter, Harold, 159
205 Pichon, Edouard, 67
Marx, Harpo, 9, 17 Plautus, 10, 158
Marx, Karl, 18, 60, 73, 82, 88–97, 99 Poe, Edgar Allan, 143
masquerade, 223, 225, 226, 229 Prince, Richard, 20, 237–242
master signifier, 160–163, 224–225, 227 punch line, 2, 3, 16, 25, 29, 33–35, 76–77, 108,
materialism, 60, 64–65 222–223
McCarthy, Tom, 20, 240
melancholia, 122, 124, 128, 163 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 18, 82–103
Menander, 13 Rabelais, François, 12, 47, 48, 53
metaphor, 16, 73, 77, 80, 92, 106, 137–138, racism, analysis of, 68–71
144–145, 147–151, 178, 193 n. 14 Rank, Otto, 18, 99
metonymy, 16, 73, 77, 80, 137–139 n. 19, 144–148, Rashi, 30
150 Reik, Theodor, 192 n. 11, 209–210, 211
Miller, D. A., 184 n. 4 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 60
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 38 n. 7, 50 n. 34, 53 n. 44, Renaissance, 156, 159, 164
54 n. 46, 123 n. 21, 24, 123 repetition, 64–65, 99, 105–108, 111–112, 180, 200,
Milton, John, 168 n. 27, 176 238–241
mirror stage, 3 repression, 1, 16, 83–84, 169–171, 173–175, 178, 181,
Möbius structure, 20, 53, 186–192, 197–198, 200, 186 n. 5, 206, 212, 216–217, 227–228, 231
202–205 Restoration comedy, 185, 194
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 4, 10, 12, 35, Ribera, José de, 60–61
66, 98 Roche, Mark William, 159
Montaigne, Michel de, 62, 182 romance, 159–161
Moreelse, Johannes, 61 Rothenberg, Molly Anne, 19–20, 184–205
Moretti, Nanni, 14 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 36
Index 247
Roustang, François, 70 Tabourot, Etienne, 53
Rubens, Peter Paul, 60–62 talking cure, 1, 136, 212
Thatcher, Margaret, 74
Sade, Marquis de, 51 Theophrastus, 11
Safouan, Moustafa, 7 tragicomedy, 19, 156–182
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36, 159 tuché, 64, 141
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 75 turbulence, 65–66
Saussure, Leopold, 51 Twain, Mark, 11
Schuster, Aaron, 2
Scott, Walter, 62 unary trait, 139–140, 187, 189, 191
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 62 unconscious, 1–3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 18–20, 51, 65, 73,
Sermon on the Mount, 165 86–88, 90, 97, 113, 129, 135–137, 145, 152–153,
Serres, Michel, 65, 95 n. 41 188, 206, 210, 219
Shakespeare, William, 13, 19, 134–135, 138–140,
142, 146, 150–154, 157, 159, 165, 172 Vappereau, Jean-Michel, 51
Hamlet, 7, 9, 76, 84–86, 139, 152, 173, 222 Velázquez, Diego, 60
Measure for Measure, 19, 156–182 Von Falke, Jakob, 85
Midsummer Night’s Dream, 19, 133–155 Von Trier, Lars, 20, 232
Sharpe, Matthew, 19, 133–155
signifier, 7–8, 10, 26–29, 31, 33, 67, 73, 78–81, 102, Walpole, Horace, 61
136, 145–146, 148, 149 n. 27, 151, 160, Warhol, Andy, 240
161–163, 169–171, 175, 178, 185, 187, 189, Webster, Jamieson, 18, 104–112
192–195, 211–213, 215, 217–218, 220–221, Westerink, Herman, 166
223–225, 227, 230 Wheeler, Richard, 157, 179, 180
Smith, Mark, 238 White, Hayden, 12
Smith, Wesley D., 62 n. 5, 63, 63 n. 6, 64 n. 7, 8 Wiederholung 108, 143, 146
Sollers, Philippe, 53 Wilder, Billy, 4
Solomon, the Wise, 15 Williams, Bernard, 42
Sophocles, 100 Winnicott, Donald W., 40
Sotion, 62 Wit, 1, 2, 4, 11, 15, 19–20, 54, 60, 77, 84,
Soulié, Frederick, 74 85, 184–185, 190, 204, 206, 209, 211
Spinoza, Baruch, 55 n. 50 (see also Witz)
split subject, 185, 188, 190, 192 Restoration, 185
Stirner, Max, 92, 93 tradition, 185–204
Steinkoler, Manya, 1–21, 25–35 Witz, 2, 54, 73–81, 83–88, 90, 99–103, 136
Sterne, Laurence, 93
Steward, Zeph, 64 n. 8 Yahweh, 25, 28, 30–35
Stoppard, Tom, 159 Yeats, William Butler, 125, 126, 182
Swift, Jonathan, 11, 12 Yogi Bear, 20, 239
Symbolic order, 10, 19, 26, 46, 108, 124, 136, 142,
146, 151, 152, 156, 160–164, 170, 175, 202, 212, Zemeckis, Robert, 11
215, 220, 224 Zeno’s paradox, 26
syncrisis, 158 Zhuravleva, Lyudmila Vasilyevna, 48
sublime, 124 Žižek, Slavoj, 19, 65, 67, 68, 95, 124, 156–157, 160,
superego, 19, 78, 104, 113–115, 119–128, 160, 162–164, 167, 172, 181
162–164, 167, 173, 177, 178, 180–181 Zupančič, Alenka, 11–12, 20, 124, 128, 139, 186,
Surrealism, 3, 53, 91 188–190, 196–197, 203, 219–233
Sylvester the Cat, 21 Zychlinski, Franz, 92

Patricia Gherovici Lacan Psychoanalysis and Comedy 1

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

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

Patricia Gherovici Lacan Psychoanalysis and Comedy 1

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

LACAN, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND COMEDY

This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic

patricia gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

part i the laughing cure 23

part ii comedy on the couch 131

part iii he who laughs last, laughs last 235

Laughter is not a decision – it happens to us, at times inappropriately

In the Beginning was Laughter

Comedy of the sexes

“Love is a comic feeling”

Don’t Cut the Comedy!

The laughing cure

Lacan on laughter – a new kind of LOL

The biblical account of Sarah’s motherhood is usually understood to be a

Psychoanalysis as gai saber

Encounter with a fantasist

Jacques Lacan is gay

Laughing about nothing

Why was Democritus laughing while Heraclitus was weeping? Tradition

* Words in Italics in English in the original text.

The surplus jouissance of the joke from Freud to Lacan

Lacan resurrects Marx’s notion of surplus jouissance (plus de jouir) as the

The techniques of the Joke (Witz)

Condensation: First approach to “The Wit of the Witz”

The surplus jouissance of the Witz

Conclusion: The wit of the Witz

Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on

Mother-pumper and the analyst’s donuts

Is laughter in psychoanalysis subversive? Does it erupt in the same way as a

He detailed a history of her abusive relationship (she was the instigator)

Not in the humor

Superego: Friend or foe?

Annie believes herself to be a wicked person, not allowed or entitled to

Comedy and the agency of the letter in A Midsummer

“Comedy and tragedy are made of the same alphabet.” 1

Bringing Lacan to A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Love in idleness”and the midsummer night’s dreamers’

From metonymy (Puck) to the paternal metaphor (Oberon/

The term “translation” in Elizabethan as in modern English carried a

Metaphor, restoring sense to ﬂoating signiﬁers

Figure 8.4: Hugo’s sheaf metaphor27

Figure 8.5: The paternal metaphor or “name of the father”

And so it is appropriate that in MND, it is the combined work of the

Concluding remarks: On love, psychoanalysis and comedy

Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy

What is the psychoanalytic theory of tragicomedy?

Tragicomedy as speciﬁcally modern

“The superego is law run amok”

Elizabethan tragicomedy and the crisis of symbolic authority

Jane Austen’s wit-craft

The paradoxical ego ideal

The ideal king of comedy

The restoration wit tradition

Burney’s narrative invention

The particular universal of love

The perambulatory process

Power in the closet (and its coming out)

If there is genuine novelty in the psychoanalytic take on jokes and comedy,

Adelman, Janet, 176 Burney, Fanny, 19, 185–186, 194–198, 203

You might also like