Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy 9781107086173, 1107086175

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Title page......Page 5
Copyright information......Page 6
Table of contents......Page 7
Introduction......Page 9
In the Beginning was Laughter......Page 11
Comedy of the sexes......Page 12
‘‘Love is a comic feeling’’......Page 13
Dying of laughter......Page 14
Don’t Cut the Comedy!......Page 15
Comedy’s Power......Page 19
Laughing stock......Page 21
The laughing cure......Page 23
Lacan on laughter - a new kind of LOL......Page 24
Lacan.com-edy......Page 25
Works cited......Page 29
Part I The laughing cure......Page 31
Chapter 1 Sarah’s laughter: Where babies and humor come from......Page 33
Works cited......Page 43
Encounter with a fantasist......Page 44
Jacques Lacan is gay......Page 47
Gay psychoanalysis......Page 57
Episteme of laughter......Page 62
Works cited......Page 66
Chapter 3 Laughing about nothing: Democritus and Lacan......Page 68
Works cited......Page 79
The techniques of the Joke (Witz)......Page 81
Condensation: First approach to ‘‘The Wit of the Witz’’......Page 84
The surplus jouissance of the Witz......Page 86
Works cited......Page 89
Chapter 5 Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on the economy of jokes1......Page 90
I......Page 91
II......Page 96
III......Page 103
IV......Page 107
Works cited......Page 111
Chapter 6 Mother-pumper and the analyst’s donuts......Page 112
Works cited......Page 120
Chapter 7 Not in the humor: Bulimic dreams......Page 121
Dry humor......Page 123
Wet humor......Page 125
Superego: Friend or foe?......Page 128
II......Page 133
Afterword......Page 136
Works cited......Page 137
Part II Comedy on the couch......Page 139
Bringing Lacan to A Midsummer Night’s Dream......Page 141
‘‘Love in idleness’’and the midsummer night’s dreamers’ structural dance......Page 148
From metonymy (Puck) to the paternal metaphor (Oberon/Theseus): The midsummer night’s dreamwork......Page 152
Metonymy......Page 153
Metaphor, restoring sense to floating signifiers......Page 156
Concluding remarks: On love, psychoanalysis and comedy......Page 158
Works cited......Page 162
Chapter 9 Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy: Measure for Measure after Zizek’s Lacanian dialectics......Page 164
Tragicomedy as specifically modern......Page 165
‘‘The superego is law run amok’’......Page 168
Elizabethan tragicomedy and the crisis of symbolic authority......Page 172
Angelo......Page 175
Isabella......Page 180
Lucio......Page 186
Vincentio......Page 188
Works Cited......Page 190
Introduction......Page 192
The paradoxical ego ideal......Page 195
The ideal king of comedy......Page 197
The restoration wit tradition......Page 199
Burney’s narrative invention......Page 202
Austen’s wit-craft......Page 206
The particular universal of love......Page 210
Works cited......Page 213
Chapter 11 The perambulatory process: Eros, wit and society-testing in Henry James’s ‘‘The Chaperon’’......Page 214
Works cited......Page 226
Chapter 12 Power in the closet (and its coming out)......Page 227
Works cited......Page 241
Part III He who laughs last, laughs last......Page 243
Epilogue: Repetition, repetition, repetition: Richard Prince and the three r’s......Page 245
Index......Page 251

Citation preview

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 practitioners 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 Association 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

Contents

vi 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 psychoanalytic 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

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(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

2

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. 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 analysands 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 invention 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.

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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 communicate 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 psychoanalysis, 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 pleasures, 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

5 6

7

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1998), 135. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre VIII: Le transfert 1960–1961 (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 134. 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. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XV: Moment de Conclure, November 5, 1977, unpublished papers.

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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 psychoanalysis’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 10

11

Lacan, Le Séminaire XV: Moment de Conclure. Quoted in Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982), 134. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XXII: R.S.I., March 11, 1975, unpublished papers.

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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 laughter 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 impermanence. 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 transforming himself; he is an agent of the endurance of life – the comedic hero has 12

13

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 314. 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 realization 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

Ibid., 313.

15

Ibid., 55.

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patricia gherovici and manya steinkoler

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 Aristophanes’ 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, comparing 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 representation 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 contention 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

17 19

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. 18 Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 262. Ibid. Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314.

Introduction

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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 psychoanalysis 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 Theophrastus, 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

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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 transformative 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 accommodation which rather than being simply complicit allows for further questioning; 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 selfimportance of those in power, (influencing Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift and even something as recent as Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove) or the “New 20

21

Herman Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 181. Alenka Zupančič. The Odd One In: On Comedy (Short Circuits). (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

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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 conversation. 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 ko´¯ mē (village) and ᾠδή ōide´¯ (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 America’s most important export.” This quotation raises the question of whether laughter is just raw material for capital exploitation a commodifiable “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

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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, considering Benjamin’s view a naive optimism that he ascribed to “anarchistic romanticism.”24 This debate can be revisited when we consider the phenomenon 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 nevertheless “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.

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24

Theodor Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verson, 1980), 123. Ibid.

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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.

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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, reformulating 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 27

28

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation (Paris, Le Seuil, 2013), 488. 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. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Mariner, 2014), 527.

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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 psychoanalytic readings of canonical comedic and satirical literary forms. The epilogue, “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.

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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, provocatively 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: Democritus and Lacan,” Patricia Gherovici revisits the laughing philosopher Democritus’ 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 nothingness, 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 sublimation 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

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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 unconscious 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

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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 operations 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.

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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 York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.

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patricia gherovici and manya steinkoler 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

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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

2

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. Ibid., 69.

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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

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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 fundamentally 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

4

See Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Ancient Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). All Bible citations are from the Sapirstein edition. See Works cited.

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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.

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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

7

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) See chapter 24 in The Torah with Rashi’s Commentary, Sapirstein edition.

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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 “annunciation 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, childbirth is effectively denaturalized, a primary aim of the Patriarchal narratives. 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 emphasize 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. Interestingly, 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

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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 Abraham 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 everything – 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).

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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-hommemoinzun9 – 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 problematic. In this conjugation the verb appears 13 times in the Old Testament10 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

10

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. See James Strong, ed., The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Bible Concordance (New York: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2010).

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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 12

13

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 133. 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. 14 Ibid., 138. Ibid.

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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

2

3

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. Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1997), 261. Chapsal, “Jacques Lacan,” 38.

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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 contemporary 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

5

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/. Jacques Lacan, “La troisième,” La cause freudienne 79 (September 2011): 15.

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Anyone who has ever read the text called Television, which was published 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

7

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. The small volume entitled Television is effectively the edited text of two one-hour long “Lacanshows” 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.

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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

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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 9

Jacques Lacan, “Discours de clôture des journées sur les psychoses,” Recherches 8 (1968): 145. 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.

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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. JacquesAlain 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.

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“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 ‘cheerful 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

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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. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton & London: Princeton University Press, 2013). 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). 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.

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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

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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 University Press, 2005), 123. 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.

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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

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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. 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. 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

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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

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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 AnsellPearson, “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. 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. 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.

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(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, someone who, when he gets down to do his business, cannot conform to any kind of accepted practice or standard pattern, neither within the symbolic 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.

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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. 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.

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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 meaning 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 25 26

Jacques Lacan, “Discours de Rome,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 146. Ibid, 149, 152. 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.

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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 anniversary 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

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See Roger Dragonetti, “Dante et Narcisse ou les faux-monnayeurs de l’image,” Revue des Etudes Italiennes 102 (1965): 85–146. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse, unpublished, session of January 19, 1966. 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. Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 2001), 453.

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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 32

33

Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, 22. Translation modified. 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. 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.

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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 psychanalyse 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

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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. 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. 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. 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 University Press, 1988), 72. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre IV: La relation d’objet, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1994), 334.

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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 crosscap, 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

40 41

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. Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 344. 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).

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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 judgment on Lacan’s state of mind, but if we take the text not as the production 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

43

For a facsimile and transcription of the document, see Jacques Lacan, Œuvres graphiques et manuscrits (Paris: Artcurial Briest, 2006), 42. 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.

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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 “wellspoken” (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

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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’insuque-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). 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).

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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 epistemology. 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

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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. 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). Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London & New York: Routledge, 1975), 96. 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.

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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, openended, 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

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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.

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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 psychoanalytic 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 psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni brilliantly captured with the phrase “I know very 51

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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). See Max Eastman, Heroes I Have Known: Twelve who Lived Great Lives (New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1942), 261–273.

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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 Wissenschaft, 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

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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. See Tim Dean, “The Frozen Countenance of the Perversions,” Parallax 14.2 (2008): 93–114 and 108, in particular. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 182–183.

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proposition ‘The species is everything, an individual is always nothing’ has become part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility 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.

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Ibid., 27–28.

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Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient. Edited by Jacques-Alain 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 University Press, 2001.

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 materialists, 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 Democritus: 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, Rembrandt 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 Brugghen 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.)

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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

3

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 20. Letter to Sir Horace Mann, December 31, 1769.

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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 literature 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 Democritus’ 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 Democritus 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

5

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 50. 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.

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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 madness.” 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 supposedly mad philosopher laugh. After they had a conversation, Hippocrates was disarmed by the courtesy 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 Democritus’ 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 Democritus 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.

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manners.”7 When Hippocrates asked Democritus why he laughed, Democritus 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. 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. 8

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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 conception introduces turbulence into an unconscious “structured like a language.” 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 univocity”16 translated as “sense is a bifurcation in the unequivocal.”17 Turbulence disturbs repetition by troubling the flow of the identical; it pulls and 12

13

14

15

16

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See Madlen Dolar, “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik , Volume XXXIV, Number 2 (2013): 11–26. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 59. Italics in the original. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 64. Italics in the original. Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: Deux leçons sur “L’ étourdit” de Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 82. Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et turbulence (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 179. Michael Serres, The Birth of Physics, ed. David Webb and trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 145.

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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 digression 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.

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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 nonFrench speakers, notice that the same pattern is repeated with the neologism “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 invention: 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 signifierness,”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

21 24

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. 22 23 Dolar, “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan,” 23. Ibid. Ibid., 22. 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.

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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.

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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 transgressing 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.

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I exchanged jokes with Mercedes with the intent to address the jouissance she had projected onto the Jewish lady. During one session, Mercedes 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 strategies 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

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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 forgotten 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 undecidability 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.

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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. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 246.

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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. 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. “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 experience of lalangue. One can already find in Freud this dimension of the subject in his trilogy of works dedicated to the language of the unconscious: 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

2

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 31. 3 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 86. Ibid., 72.

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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” condense 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

Ibid., 52.

5

Ibid., 20.

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“Golden Calf” belongs to what Saussure calls an associative series founded on an analogy of signifiers, that is, a class of semantic equivalences. 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 propositions 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.

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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 considerable 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

Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 47.

7

Ibid.

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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, substituting 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.

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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

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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

9

Roman Jakobson and Linda Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). Sigmund Freud, Der Lustmechanismus und Die Psychogenese Des Witzes. Gesammelte Werke VI (1905), 153.

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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 incomparably 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 inhibitioneroding 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.

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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 York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990. 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

2

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. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin, 2002), 49.

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I Freud’s joke book offers one of the most systematic developments of the economic point of view applied to unconscious formations. Freud reiterates 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 jokework: a joke will economize on psychical expenditure while it also overcomes or bypasses the critical sense deriving from repression or inhibition. 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 6

7

4 5 Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 114. See ibid., 9–13. Ibid., 113. 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. 8 Spiel and Scherz. Freud, Der Witz, 121. Ibid., 127.

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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 revolutionary 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 extravagance and exuberance: Whenever the free enjoyment of nonsense is permitted, 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 12

Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 129. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 5.

10

Ibid., 129–130.

11

Ibid., 134.

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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 cashstrapped 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 tonguein-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

Ibid., 33.

14

Ibid., 60.

15

Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 59.

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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 19

17 18 Ibid., 136. Ibid., 34. Ibid. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 80 in a note.

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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 complex 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

Ibid., 150.

21

Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 150; Der Witz, 147.

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jean-michel rabate´ 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 surplusvalue, Lacan chanced upon a passage describing the capitalist’s understanding 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 surplusvalue.”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

23

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 599–600. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XVI. D’un Autre à l’autre, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 64–65.

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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 consequently 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 “metamorphosis,” 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 metamorphosis 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

25

26

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. See Jacques Lacan, “Logical time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006,), 161–175. 27 28 Marx, Capital, 215–217. Ibid., 239 in a note. Ibid., 241.

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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 Unconscious 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

Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 4.

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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 economy 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 production. 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

31

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. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 512.

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jean-michel rabate´ 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

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 512.

33

Ibid., 514–515.

34

Ibid., 160.

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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 subordinated 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

36

Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 43. 37 38 Ibid., 45. Ibid., 48. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 161.

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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, Lichtenberg, 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.

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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 philosophy 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

41

Marx, “Supplementary to Dedicated Verses: Some Chapters from Scorpion and Felix: A Humoristic Novel,” 629. See Michel Serres, “Les bijoux distraits ou la cantatrice sauve,” Critique 277 (June 1970): 485–497.

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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 capitalism. 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 knowledge, 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 jouissance” 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.

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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 slaughterbench 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 accumulating 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

44 46

See Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres Écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 403–446. 45 Lacan, “Radiophonie,” 434. Lacan, “Radiophonie,” 415. André Gide, Le Prométhée mal enchainé, in Romans et Récits, vol. 1, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, 2009), 471.

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analysis of Heine’s famous coining. Zeus is making experiments with the concept of “gratuitous gesture” (acte gratuit, which means both “unmotivated 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 memories, 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

48 49

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1998), 261. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 641. Ibid.

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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 psychoanalytical 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

51

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. Sándor Ferenczi, “Laughter,” in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis, vol. 3, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 177.

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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 calculations whose expectations are suddenly baffled. This recurs in one of the examples of “Witz” mentioned by Ferenczi, a dialogue between a psychoanalyst 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 postnatal 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

54

Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 46. 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. 55 Ferenczi, “Laughter,” 180. Ibid., 179.

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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 mistake, 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 potentiality 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 58 60

Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 49. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 40. Ibid., 50.

57 59

Freud, Der Witz, 59. Freud, Der Witz, 50.

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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 presupposed 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 surplusvalue, 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,

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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

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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 interpreted 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

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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 differently 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

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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.

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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

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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.”

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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 jouissance, 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.

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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

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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 collapse 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. 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., 1981. 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 condition 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

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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 universe 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 functional 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 anhedonic 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

2

Sigmund Freud, “On Humor,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (1927), 165. Ibid., 166.

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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 Melancholia paper.3 Here, the ego is worthless and found to be morally despicable, 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 anhedonic 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

4

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 246. Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the 1999 film Being John Malkovich.

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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 catalogues 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 historical 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

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Afkhami, Amir Arsalan, Encyclopaedia Iranica (2004), www.iranicaonline.org/articles/humoralism-1 See also the print edition, vol. 12, Fasc. 6, 566–570. 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.

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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 bloodletting.7 His view of disease, as articulated in his Ketāb al-qānun fi’l-tebb, _ 7

Afkhami, Encyclopaedia Iranica.

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integrated the Hippocratic views of humoral primacy with Galenic precepts 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 disseminations 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

9

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Joseph Desirée Tholozan, Rapport à Sa Majesté le Chah sur l’état actuel de l’hygiène en Perse (Tehran 1869), cited in Afkhami. 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. Rhianna, “Understanding & Accepting Emotional Detoxification,” Embracing Health (blog), March 26, 2012, www.embracinghealthblog.com/2012/03/26/understanding-accepting-emotionaldetoxification/.

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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 anhedonic, 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 humorless” 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 thirteenth 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).

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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 conceptualizations 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 insignificant, 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 13

Ibid. 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).

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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 antidepressant 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 encouraged 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

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16

See Adrian Johnston, “The Forced Choice of Enjoyment: Jouissance between Expectation and Actualization,” www.lacan.com/forced.htm. 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. This scene takes place in the third film in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” released in 2004.

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imagine this feared object or figure made ridiculous. The spell is performed 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 maturational 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

18

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. Freud, “On Humor,” 166.

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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 ridiculous.”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 inscription 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 psychoanalytic 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 21

22 23 24

20 Critchley and Cederström, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, 90. Ibid. 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. Miller, “A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic.” Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 83. 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!

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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 egoideal 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 Experiences 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

26

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(My paraphrasing.) Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994). Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. 36. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real Kant and Lacan (London & New York: Verso, 2000), 152.

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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, loverThrough 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

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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.

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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 twoday 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).

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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 ridiculous.”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 notin-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 31

Critchley and Cederström, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, 90. 32 S. Freud. Op.cit. p. 163 Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, 163.

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mobilize desire in the subject who has discovered a way to exist (albeit minimally in some cases) that testifies to her worthlessness and degradation. 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 2

3

Francis Bacon, Promus of Formularies and Elegancies (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: Boston, 1883), #516. 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). William Shakespeare, Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).

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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

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5

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). 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).

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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 cityfounding 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 enchantedmaternal-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 woodlands, 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

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7 8

C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 137. Burton qtd. in Krajnik, “In the Shadow of Night,” 68. 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.

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This chapter wants to bring to the analysis of MND materials drawn from Jacques Lacan’s post-Freudian understanding of “Titania and Oberon’s realm,” the Freudian unconscious, drawing on resources from structuralist 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 groundbreaking 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 connection 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

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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. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter and ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Routledge, 2002), 314. 12 Lacan, Seminar V, December 18, 1957, unpublished papers. 13. Lacan, Écrits, 581/692. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314.

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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, blissfully 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

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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. Plato’s academy was in woodlands just outside Athens’ city walls.

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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)

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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. “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.

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(“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 wellrounded 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 onedimensional. 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 Helena’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

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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.” 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

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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 postromantic 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, understandably miffed by her friend’s filching of her beloved, expresses in the opening scenes her ardent desire to “change places” with Helena: in language,

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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. 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.

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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 Demetrius, 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 . . .

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matthew sharpe . . . Lord, what though? Yet Hermia still loves you: then be content. 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 lovechoices 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.

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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 principal, 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 starcrossed 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:

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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 translated.”(MND III, i) Puck soon after, boasting about his sport with Bottom and the (understandably terrified) mechanicals to King Oberon, underscores 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).

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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 “translations” 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 perspective highlights what is for him the basic ability of language per se: that of replacing objects by signifiers, things by their designating words. In metonymic 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

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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). Lacan, Seminar V, 13.

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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, presignifying 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 identities 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

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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 operations 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.

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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, “metonymy 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, however errantly. Likewise, in Lacanian theory, metonymy is finally subordinate 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 directly on the paternal, regenerative function: “His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful.” Indeed, according to Lacan, the earliest, underlying basis of the possibility 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.

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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-tobe 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.

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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 hijinx.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 dreaming), 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)

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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 highlighting 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 Shakespeare’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

Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314.

30

Lacan, Seminar V, 17.

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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

32

33

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) “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) 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.

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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

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Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (Chrysoma Associates Limited Publications Division Electronic Books Library, 2000–2005), 20. See Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference Love,” SE XII: 157– 171. 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.

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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/

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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 intersubjective 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 ideological 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 suddenly appear to be transformed from legitimate representatives of social norms into abusers of power aiming at forbidden satisfactions.

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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 arbitrarily 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, something 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” impossibility 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.

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moment in literary and dramaturgical history characterised by the cultural centrality of tragicomedy is the short period from the 1580s to the beginning 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 tragicomedy becomes a kind of [post-]metaphysical drama.2

Although Elizabethan literary critics recognised the originality of tragicomedy, 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 Amphitryon3, but the reference is sarcastic because it denotes the nullity of an absurd syncretism. Interestingly, recent critics have corroborated the Elizabethan 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 presupposes. 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

3

Karl Guthke. Modern Tragicomedy: An Investigation into the Nature of the Genre (New York: Random House, 1966), 98–100. 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.

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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 represented 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

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5 7

8

9

See Marvin Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France and England. 2nd edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 70. 6 See ibid., 68–72. Ibid., 135. See Raphael Lyne’s introduction to In Early Modern Tragicomedy, eds. Raphael Lyne and Subha Mukherji (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2007), 1–21. See Richard Dutton, Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee and Storey (Brighton: Harvester, 1986). See David Hirst, Tragicomedy (London: Methuen, 1984), 5–12.

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(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 perspective 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 background. 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 institutions 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.

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During the last election campaign in Slovenia . . . a member of the ruling political party was approached by an elderly lady from his local constituency, 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.

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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 unification 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 internationalist, communist interlude in the twentieth century demonstrates, substitutes 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. Furthermore, the discontinuity between prince and pope, as bearers of these ideals, and the head of the family unit, as responsible for discipline and punishment, 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 functions 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 inconsistency of the master signifier, something that brings the “non-existence of 12

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 313.

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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 relationship between public Law and its obscene superego underside also undergoes a radical change. In traditional patriarchal society, the inherent transgression 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

14

Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London & New York: Verso, 1994), 61. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968), §11:25, 13, 18:4–12.

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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 signifying 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 17

Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, 56. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 325.

16

Ibid., 66.

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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 undermined 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 metacomedy 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,

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20

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. See Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 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.

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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 springing from the lack of fit between ethical conventions and natural inclinations. 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 puritanism. 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 conventionality of the cultural order. Behind the uncertainty provoked by the disintegration of the imaginary representation of the divinity lie the deeper libidinal economies of Reformation theology, something which directly informs the disturbing effects generated by Measure for Measure. As Herman Westerink has demonstrated 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 omniscient, 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 inscrutable from the perspective of temporal morality. Further questioning, 21

22

See Marliss Desens, The Bed Trick in English Renaissance Drama: Explorations in Gender, Sexuality and Power (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 223–224. See Herman Westerink, The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2012).

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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 predestination (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 representation 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 indifferent 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 permeation 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 saturated with guilt and fixated on the imaginary distinctions between good and evil, licit and illicit, ideal and natural. Against the background of a 23

24

Luther, qtd. in Westerink, The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought, 54. Ibid, 37–38, 58–59.

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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 consummating 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

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27

See, for example, Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 211. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Preface, Books I and VIII) (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989), 1.120. John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 1989), 1.2.100. All future citations can be found in the body of the essay.

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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 signification. 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 disgust). 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 unmistakeably 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

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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 excruciating “waste,” springing from original sin – believed to involve fornication. The animal imagery connected with sexual impulses is pervasively represented in terms of a degrading form of self-contamination and selfdestruction. 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 prohibition, 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 29 30

Peter Huff, “Calvin and the Beasts,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42.1 (1999): 68. Ibid., 73. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge. 4th edn. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.4.17–18.

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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 femininity, 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).

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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 hypocritical righteousness. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s representation of Isabella’s moral purity is based on Protestant anti-monastic polemics about the confusion of internal sanctity with external obedience.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 33

34

Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 71–72. See Darryl Gless, Measure for Measure: The Law and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). See Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2004).

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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 confirmation 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 (sardonic 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 37

36 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 331. Ibid. See Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2012).

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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 intensification 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 development. 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.

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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 substitute 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 identification” 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 provides the sole means for the infant to articulate instinctual needs, represented 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.

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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 desperately 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 debasement 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, alongside 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.

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sadism, in a shocking disclosure of the dark enjoyment at the heart of the superego’s imperative behind Calvinist guilt. Isabella’s response, meanwhile, involves the adoption of a victimised subject-position, freighted with imagery of bondage and supported by vivid scenarios of masochistic sexuality. 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

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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 commandment 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.

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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 execution, 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 symbolically 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.

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[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 “contrarious 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 judgement 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

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Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, 126.

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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 manipulations 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 inconsistency. 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 Claudio; 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 sexualization 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 44

See Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 2001. Slavoj Žižek, “Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple,” Lacanian Ink (1997).

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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.

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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 entertainment as requiring “one thing very clever. . .two things moderately clever, or three things very dull indeed,” Miss Bates remarks in her usual selfdeprecating 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 quickwitted 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 2 4

For Michael Holquist, who taught me how to enjoy the nonsense. 3 Jane Austen, Emma (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 275. Ibid., 277, 275. 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: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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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 criticism 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 psychoanalytically 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

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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.

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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 presubjectified 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 identification 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

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incompatible qualities, although the contradiction must remain unconscious 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 aristocracy 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 (identification with the universal absolute Other) makes him the paragon of desirability (identification with the lacking, desiring Other). That is, from 6

7

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). Zupančič, The Odd One In, 316–351.

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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 particularity: 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 destabilizing 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 10

9 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 354. Ibid., 354–356. 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.

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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 indistinction 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

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who believes unwarrantedly in the power of a notional Other to permanently 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 performance 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

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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 privilege 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

12

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.” John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693. http://en.wikiquote .org/wiki/John_Dryden

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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

14

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). 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 eighteenthcentury 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.

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power and materializing the hinge between the corporeal body and symbolic 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 propensity 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 birthright is restored by her aristocratic father and her engagement to the virtuous Lord Orville is secured.

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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. 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).

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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 misinterpretation 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 guarantee 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 permanently 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 appropriates 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?”

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molly anne rothenberg “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.

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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 problem 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 perspective, 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 guaranteeing an accurate, objective assessment or simply as a mirage generated by the interplay of social regard that obscures a partial Other. The

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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 fantasmatic 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 accurately 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 technique 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 Burney, 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 unconscious 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.

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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

Austen, Emma, 274.

19

Ibid., 273.

20

Austen, Emma, 275.

21

Ibid., 275.

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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 uncomfortable 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 dependence 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

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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 identification 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 Restoration 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.

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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 displayed. 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.

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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 Knightley’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, Knightley 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 linguistic 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 “guarantor” of sentimental virtue. By the same token, Austen is no advocate of a 24

Austen, Emma, 322.

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market-based or individualistic approach to social value. Instead, she proposes 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

Austen, Emma, 360.

26

Ibid., 177.

27

Ibid., 285.

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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 Groucholike 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 University Press, 2003. 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 anodyne 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 maintains.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 sensuality, 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 2

Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in the Standard Edition 8 (1905), 92. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 111.

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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 4 5

Ibid. Henry James, Collected Stories, ed. John Bayley (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1999), 1186. 6 Ibid. Henry James, Collected Stories, 1187.

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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 Honourable 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 11

Henry James, Collected Stories, 1184. Ibid.

8

Ibid., 1194.

9

Ibid., 1190.

10

Ibid., 1186.

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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 coterminous manner the idea of a hood or cape. Thus as she drapes her mother’s alltoo-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 simultaneously 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 14

13 Ibid., 1206. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 111. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 86.

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surprise “is an expression of our opposition to the demand that we recognize something long known to us of which we have become unconscious.”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 Gwendolyn 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 inevitable 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 16

Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co., 1948), 247. 17 18 Henry James, Collected Stories, 1205. Ibid. Ibid.

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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

Henry James, Collected Stories, 1187.

20

Ibid., 1206.

21

Ibid., 1207.

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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 subsequently 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 discussion 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 23

Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in the Standard Edition 23 (1937), 266. Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” 262.

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“cuckolded” in advance. In every aspect of its being, desire is riven by the indestructible trace of the signifier that brought it into existence, guaranteeing 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 perceptions, 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), necessitating 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 25

Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 191. Freud, “Negation,” in the Standard Edition 19 (1925), 237.

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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 hallucinatory 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 difference 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 wellknown formulation, the subject is confronted with a “forced choice” 26 27

Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 192–193. Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in the Standard Edition, 12 (1911), 218–219.

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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 continues 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, deflowering 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

Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 110.

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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 “roundabout” 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 31

Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 155. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 28.

30

Ibid., 156.

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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 enjoyment 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 “language 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

33

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1998), lesson 8.1.58. Ibid., lesson of 18.12.57.

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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 University Press, 1996. 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, deadlock, 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 production, 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.

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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 fundamentally 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 presupposition in different ways, exploring the fundamental function of this presupposition: 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

3

4

Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1998), 262. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992), 314. The phallus appeared in classical drama in the form of a comical prop.

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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.

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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 discourse. 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 contemporary 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 authority. 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

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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 functions. They enjoy the pure signifying surface of power, sneaking underneath 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

7

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). 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).

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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 question: 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 enjoyment 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.

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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 insignia 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 10 11

Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 48. Genet, The Balcony, 53. 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.

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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 “masquerade,” 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

Genet, The Balcony, 78.

13

Ibid., 72.

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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. Restoration is shown to function as a structural platform of cynical knowledge about how things really stand, integrating this knowledge into the structure 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 disillusionment works perfectly in maintaining the status quo. We could even say that the political game of late capitalism works not in spite of our disillusionment, 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

Ibid., 80.

15

Lacan, Les formations de l’inconscient, 265.

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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 overwhelming 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

17

Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other works, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 438. 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.

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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:

18 19

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 . . ..

Genet, The Balcony, 72. Genet makes reference to the controversial “Valley of the Fallen,” the mausoleum built by Franco in Spain.

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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, reverberates 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 22

Genet, The Balcony, 93. Genet, The Balcony, 94.

21 23

Lacan, Les formations de l’inconscient, 268. Ibid., 92.

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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 functions 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 exercising 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 indistinguishable 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

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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 inconsistency. 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 appearance 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

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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 consequence, 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 consequences 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 appreciated, 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 instrumentalized 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.

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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. Le Séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient. Edited by Jacques-Alain 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.”

Here’s another one: The only contribution America has made towards furniture is the electric chair.

Here’s another one: I always know when my sister’s having her period. Because my father’s prick tastes funny.

Here’s another one: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks, “Hey, why the long face?”

Here’s another one: “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.”

Here’s another one: 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 earsplitting yell.” “My dear,” the shrink said, “that’s completely natural. 237

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simon critchley I don’t see what the problem is?” “The problem is,” she complained, “it wakes me up.”

Here’s another one: 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?”

Here’s another one: 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 compulsive 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.

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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 displaced. 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 repetitiveness 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.

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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 repetitions 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,

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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.”

Here’s another one: “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,

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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 audience. 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 Adorno, Theodor W., 13–15 Albee, Edward, 159 Allen, Woody, 8, 11, 17, 113, 241 Althusser, Louis, 91, 96 anhedonia, 19, 113, 125, 128 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 82 annunciation scene, 31–32 Aristophanes, 8, 10, 12, 136, 158–159 Aristotle, 4, 64 Arrabal, Fernando, 159 Assman, Jan, 28 Assoun, Paul-Laurent, 56 n. 51 Augustine, 168 Austen, Jane, 19, 184–186, 198–205 Emma, 19, 184–185, 198–205 automaton, 64 Avicenna, 117–118 Badiou, Alain, 20, 67, 220–221, 226, 228 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12, 135 Bataille, George, 16 Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 239 Beckett, Samuel, 18, 20, 62, 71, 159, 240–241 Benjamin, Walter, 13–14, 18, 91, 102 Bergson, Henri, 12, 20, 99, 239 Black Humor, 3, 117 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 95 Borges, Jorge Luis, 99 Born, Bertran de, 46 Bouasse, Henri, 51 Boucher, Geoff, 19, 156–182 Božovič, Miran, 164 Breuer, Josef, 153 Breton, André, 3 brevity, 84–85 Brooks, Mel, 8 Brugghen, Hendrick ter, 60, 62 Bruyère, Jean de la, 11, 61 bungled act, 1, 51

Burney, Fanny, 19, 185–186, 194–198, 203 Evelina, 19, 186, 194–198 The Witlings, 194 Burton, Robert, 63 Butler, Judith, 6 Caillois, Roger, 232 Calvin, John, 157, 166–182 Camus, Albert, 66 Carracci, Annibale, 60 Carroll, Lewis, 16–17, 90 Cassin, Barbara, 65, 66 n. 15, 67 castration, 16, 26, 28, 33–34, 56, 104, 174–175, 179, 229–231, 233 catharsis, 10 censorship, 2, 13, 79, 151, 206, 216, 219 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 12, 94, 159 Chaitin, Gilbert, 145, 148, 211 Chapsal, Madeleine, 36, 49 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 106 Charlie Hebdo, 21, 82 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 116, 119 Chintio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), 159 Churchill, Frank, 184 circumcision, 27–29 clinamen, 64 comedy death, 6, 8–9 desire, 11, 14, 16, 19, 136 etymology, 13 love, 4–8, 134–154, 171, 173–176, 185, 187, 202–203, 207–208 phallus, 7–8, 136 power, 219–220, 227, 230–232 Real, 9, 136 talking cure, 1, 15, 136 condensation, 16, 74, 76–81, 83, 90, 96, 104 Congreve, William, 13, 194 Cooper, Donald, 40 Copjec, Joan, 49 n. 32, 213, 214 n. 24 Cotard, Jules, 115–116

243

244

Index

Cotard syndrome, 115–117 courtly love, 48 Coyote, Wile E., 9, 20, 240 Coypel, Antoine, 61 cut (scansion), 3 Critchley, Simon, 20–21, 27, 120 n. 13, 121–123, 128, 237–242 Cusanus, Nicholas, 54 cynicism, 63, 102 Damourette, Jacques, 67 Dante, 48 Dean, Tim, 57 democracy, 13, 82, 220–221, 228 Democritus, 18, 60–68 den, 64–68, 69 Descartes, René, 61 desire, 2, 11, 14, 16, 19, 48, 49 n. 32, 78, 80, 97, 105–106, 108, 110, 112, 123–124, 128–129, 136, 146, 148, 153, 167, 172, 179, 181, 189, 192, 199, 202, 211–213, 215, 217, 220 as cure, 123, 128–129 of the Other, 181, 187, 192, 211 disavowal, 56, 57 Disney, Walt, 13 Dolar, Madlen, 64, 67 Douglas, Mary, 54 Drach, Marcel, 18, 73–81 Dragonetti, Roger, 45, 47 dream-work, 133, 138, 145, 150 drive, 9, 19, 31, 47, 67, 78–79, 80–81, 105, 108–109, 112, 114, 134, 137, 167–168, 170–171, 175 Dryden, John, 192–193, 201 Dürenmatt, Friedrich, 159 Eastman, Max, 56 Eco, Umberto, 16 ego ideal, 120–124, 127, 162–163, 174, 181, 185–191, 198, 200, 203–204 Eliot, T. S., 51 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18, 43, 46 Empson, William, 171 Engels, Friedrich, 92, 93, 95 Eno, Brian, 241 Epicurus, 64 Erasmus, Desiderius, 62 Euripides, 158 fantasy, 4, 67–71, 146, 160, 164, 173, 175–176, 181, 185–192, 195–196, 198–199, 201, 203 formula of, 67 traversal of, 186–187, 189, 203 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 6 Fechner, Gustav, 84, 102

Ferenczi, Sándor, 18, 71, 99–100 Ferguson, Frances, 184 n. 4 Fierens, Christian, 67 Flaubert, Gustave, 2 Fletcher, John, 156, 159 Fliess, Wilhelm, 2 Fo, Dario, 159 Foucault, Michel, 96 Fourier, Charles, 91–92 Freud, Sigmund, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 16–18, 26, 29, 34, 37, 39, 55–56, 70–71, 73–80, 82–83, 85–88, 90, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 113–115, 119–120, 122–124, 128–129, 133, 136–137, 153, 160, 174–175, 179, 186, 206–207, 209, 211–216, 223, 227 Civilization and its Discontents, 153 “Constructions in Analysis,” 212 “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” 214 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1, 73, 82, 84, 136, 186, 206, 209 “Negation,” (Verneinung) 213–214, 228 n. 16 “On Humor,” 114 The Interpretation of Dreams, 73, 87 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 73 “The Taboo of Virginity,” 172, 175 n. 39, 179 Freudian Slip, 1 Frye, Herman Northrop, 12 Gai/gay savoir, 45, 47, 49, 55, 57 jouissance, 48 Gandhi, Indira, 47 gaze, 178, 181, 192, 197, 202 Genesis, 17, 26–28, 31 Genet, Jean, 11, 20, 159, 219, 220, 222–225, 228–229, 231 Gherovici, Patricia, 1–21, 60–71 Gide, André, 18, 97–99 Gide, Madeleine, 98 Giordano, Luca, 61 Goethe, Johann W., 90 Faust, 90, 94–95, 106 Gounod, Charles, 95 Gracián, Baltasar, 53 Griffiths, Trevor, 15, 242 Groddeck, Georg, 71 Grün, Karl, 91–92 Guthke, Karl, 158 n. 2 Guyotat, Pierre, 53 Heemskerck, Egbert van, the elder, 62 Hegel, Georg, 10, 47, 50, 91–93, 97, 146 Heidegger, Martin, 108 Heimlich, Harry, 242 Heine, Heinrich, 74–75, 90, 98

Index Heraclitus, 60–62 Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi), 95 Hippocrates, 62–64, 68, 116 Hitchcock, Alfred, 146 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 93, 94 hommoinzun, 33 Hooker, Richard, 168, 180 Horace, 61 Horkheimer, Max, 14 Huff, Peter, 169 Hugo, Victor, 66, 148 humor, 1, 3, 11, 17–19, 21, 39, 54, 63, 82, 91–95, 99, 102, 105, 107–112, 113–129, 173, 196–197, 240, 242 absence (anhedonia), 113 Jewish, origins, 26–29 sadism, 104–106 superego, 114–115 humors, 19, 63, 113, 116–120, 173 hysteria, 15, 52, 71, 96, 106 identification, 9, 15, 20, 141, 146, 152, 162, 169, 174–175, 181, 187–189 Imaginary, 16, 29, 34, 108, 141, 143, 151–153, 157, 162–163, 167, 169–170, 175–178, 188, 212, 228–229 inhibition, 25, 34, 78–81, 83–84, 102, 186 Ionesco, Eugene, 159 irony, 39, 56, 85, 91, 98, 123, 194 Jagger, Mick, 40, 41 Jakobson, Roman, 16, 18, 74, 76–81 James, Henry, 20, 207, 209, 210, 212, 215, 218 “The Chaperon,” 20, 207–213 Jewish Humor, 2, 3, 18, 26, 29 Johnson, Ben, 13 Johnston, Adrian, 121 jouissance, 6, 10, 18–19, 26, 28–34, 48, 51, 60–61, 67, 68–71, 73, 81, 96, 105, 106, 107–108, 110–111, 113–115, 119–121, 123, 126, 128, 164, 214–215, 217–218 surplus (plus de jouir, Mehrlust), 69, 73, 77, 80, 96, 99 joke, 1, 2, 9, 16, 34–35, 54, 206–207, 211, 215–218 concept joke (Gedankenwitz or Denkfehler), 73–76 condensation, 16, 74, 76–78, 80–81, 83, 90, 96, 148, 219 Democritus’, 66 economy, 76, 78, 82–91, 95–103 enjoyment, 215–218 famillionaire, 74, 76–77, 80, 83, 90, 97 language, 4 phallus, 7 sound joke (Klangwitz), 73–76

245

Joyce, James, 18, 20, 53, 90, 239, 240 Finnegans Wake, 239–240 Jöttkandt, Sigi, 20, 206–218 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 51, 93, 124 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 222 Kaufman, Charlie, 115–116 Kaufmann, Walter, 42 Kavanagh, Patrick, 125 Keaton, Buster, 9 kleptomania, 18, 109, 239 Kubrick, Stanley, 12 Lacan, Jacques, 2–7, 9–12, 14, 16–18, 20, 29, 36–41, 43, 46–47, 48–55, 57–58, 60–61, 64–68, 73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 88–91, 95–100, 106, 108, 112–113, 123–124, 136–137, 140, 143–145, 148, 151–154, 160, 169, 175, 186–187, 211–212, 214–218, 220–221, 224–227, 230–232 “Agency of the Letter,” 19, 33, 140, 145, 147 Anxiety, 6 Encore, 26, 67, 80 Formations of the Unconscious, 10, 25, 29, 35, 51, 73, 97, 136, 145 n. 25, 151, 162, 211, 219 gaiety, 36–43 “L’étourdit,” 48, 66–67 “Lituraterre,” 40 Moment to conclude, 6 My Teaching, 3 On Transference, 5 Television, 38, 48, 52, 53, 60 “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” 19, 145 The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, 10 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 9, 10 n. 18–17, 136, 220 n. 3 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 64, 65, 231–232 “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” 50 “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 47 “Radiophonie,” 97 lack, 18, 26–28, 33–34, 110, 175–176, 187–188, 191, 193, 223, 240 Laclau, Ernesto, 162 Laing, Ronald, 40 lalangue, 73, 77, 80, 81 laughter birth, 99–100 capitalist’s, 88–91 cure, 15–16, 63 ego formation, 3

246

Index

laughter (cont.) femininity, 30–33 invention, 82 love making, 6, 13 phallic function, 33 Real, 17 truth, 16 Lefort, Claude, 162 Leopold, David, 92 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 61 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 51, 77, 160 Leys d’Amors, 44–46 Lichtenberg, Georg, 94 linguisterie, 138 Locke, John, 193 n. 14 Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix, 62 love, 4–7, 9, 12, 20, 45, 48, 57, 67, 82, 91–92, 102–103, 107, 109, 113, 155, 125, 134–154, 161, 171–176, 185, 187, 194, 202–204, 207–208, 221, 224, 232–233, 237–238 Lucretius, 64, 89 Luther, Martin, 166–167 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 13 Mann, Horace, 61 n. 3 Mannoni, Maud, 40 Mannoni, Octave, 56 Marivaux, Pierre de, 4 Markley, Robert, 193 Marx, Groucho, 6, 10, 14, 20, 95–96, 189–192, 205 Marx, Harpo, 9, 17 Marx, Karl, 18, 60, 73, 82, 88–97, 99 masquerade, 223, 225, 226, 229 master signifier, 160–163, 224–225, 227 materialism, 60, 64–65 McCarthy, Tom, 20, 240 melancholia, 122, 124, 128, 163 Menander, 13 metaphor, 16, 73, 77, 80, 92, 106, 137–138, 144–145, 147–151, 178, 193 n. 14 metonymy, 16, 73, 77, 80, 137–139 n. 19, 144–148, 150 Miller, D. A., 184 n. 4 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 38 n. 7, 50 n. 34, 53 n. 44, 54 n. 46, 123 n. 21, 24, 123 Milton, John, 168 n. 27, 176 mirror stage, 3 Möbius structure, 20, 53, 186–192, 197–198, 200, 202–205 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 4, 10, 12, 35, 66, 98 Montaigne, Michel de, 62, 182 Moreelse, Johannes, 61 Moretti, Nanni, 14

Mouffe, Chantal, 162 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 5 Name-of-the-Father, 107, 146, 148–149, 175 ne explétif, 66–67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 39, 42–43, 46, 55 n. 50, 57–58, 222, 231 Nobus, Dany, 18, 36–58 Noys, Benjamin, 232 Nussbaum, Martha, 153 n. 36. object a (object cause of desire, object (a)), 18, 64–65, 67–68, 96–97, 176, 187, 189–190, 193, 197, 202, 215 object lost, 67, 108, 176, 213–215 Oedipus complex, 1, 7, 100, 134 n. 5, 136, 139, 146, 174–176, 238 Offray de la Mettrie, Julien, 61 Onkelos, 30 Overbeck, Franz, 55 n. 50 Owens, Carol, 19, 113–129 Paul, Jean (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 94 Pérez-Mora de Macias, Bianca, 40 phallus, 7, 8, 10, 20, 26–28, 136, 174–175, 217, 220–230 phallic power, 11, 20, 34, 187–189, 191, 193, 220 phallic signifier, 8, 136, 193, 217, 220–221, 225 Pinter, Harold, 159 Pichon, Edouard, 67 Plautus, 10, 158 Poe, Edgar Allan, 143 Prince, Richard, 20, 237–242 punch line, 2, 3, 16, 25, 29, 33–35, 76–77, 108, 222–223 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 18, 82–103 Rabelais, François, 12, 47, 48, 53 racism, analysis of, 68–71 Rank, Otto, 18, 99 Rashi, 30 Reik, Theodor, 192 n. 11, 209–210, 211 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 60 Renaissance, 156, 159, 164 repetition, 64–65, 99, 105–108, 111–112, 180, 200, 238–241 repression, 1, 16, 83–84, 169–171, 173–175, 178, 181, 186 n. 5, 206, 212, 216–217, 227–228, 231 Restoration comedy, 185, 194 Ribera, José de, 60–61 Roche, Mark William, 159 romance, 159–161 Rothenberg, Molly Anne, 19–20, 184–205 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 36

Index Roustang, François, 70 Rubens, Peter Paul, 60–62 Sade, Marquis de, 51 Safouan, Moustafa, 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36, 159 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 75 Saussure, Leopold, 51 Schuster, Aaron, 2 Scott, Walter, 62 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 62 Sermon on the Mount, 165 Serres, Michel, 65, 95 n. 41 Shakespeare, William, 13, 19, 134–135, 138–140, 142, 146, 150–154, 157, 159, 165, 172 Hamlet, 7, 9, 76, 84–86, 139, 152, 173, 222 Measure for Measure, 19, 156–182 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 19, 133–155 Sharpe, Matthew, 19, 133–155 signifier, 7–8, 10, 26–29, 31, 33, 67, 73, 78–81, 102, 136, 145–146, 148, 149 n. 27, 151, 160, 161–163, 169–171, 175, 178, 185, 187, 189, 192–195, 211–213, 215, 217–218, 220–221, 223–225, 227, 230 Smith, Mark, 238 Smith, Wesley D., 62 n. 5, 63, 63 n. 6, 64 n. 7, 8 Sollers, Philippe, 53 Solomon, the Wise, 15 Sophocles, 100 Sotion, 62 Soulié, Frederick, 74 Spinoza, Baruch, 55 n. 50 split subject, 185, 188, 190, 192 Stirner, Max, 92, 93 Steinkoler, Manya, 1–21, 25–35 Sterne, Laurence, 93 Steward, Zeph, 64 n. 8 Stoppard, Tom, 159 Swift, Jonathan, 11, 12 Symbolic order, 10, 19, 26, 46, 108, 124, 136, 142, 146, 151, 152, 156, 160–164, 170, 175, 202, 212, 215, 220, 224 syncrisis, 158 sublime, 124 superego, 19, 78, 104, 113–115, 119–128, 160, 162–164, 167, 173, 177, 178, 180–181 Surrealism, 3, 53, 91 Sylvester the Cat, 21

247

Tabourot, Etienne, 53 talking cure, 1, 136, 212 Thatcher, Margaret, 74 Theophrastus, 11 tragicomedy, 19, 156–182 tuché, 64, 141 turbulence, 65–66 Twain, Mark, 11 unary trait, 139–140, 187, 189, 191 unconscious, 1–3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 18–20, 51, 65, 73, 86–88, 90, 97, 113, 129, 135–137, 145, 152–153, 188, 206, 210, 219 Vappereau, Jean-Michel, 51 Velázquez, Diego, 60 Von Falke, Jakob, 85 Von Trier, Lars, 20, 232 Walpole, Horace, 61 Warhol, Andy, 240 Webster, Jamieson, 18, 104–112 Westerink, Herman, 166 Wheeler, Richard, 157, 179, 180 White, Hayden, 12 Wiederholung 108, 143, 146 Wilder, Billy, 4 Williams, Bernard, 42 Winnicott, Donald W., 40 Wit, 1, 2, 4, 11, 15, 19–20, 54, 60, 77, 84, 85, 184–185, 190, 204, 206, 209, 211 (see also Witz) Restoration, 185 tradition, 185–204 Witz, 2, 54, 73–81, 83–88, 90, 99–103, 136 Yahweh, 25, 28, 30–35 Yeats, William Butler, 125, 126, 182 Yogi Bear, 20, 239 Zemeckis, Robert, 11 Zeno’s paradox, 26 Zhuravleva, Lyudmila Vasilyevna, 48 Žižek, Slavoj, 19, 65, 67, 68, 95, 124, 156–157, 160, 162–164, 167, 172, 181 Zupančič, Alenka, 11–12, 20, 124, 128, 139, 186, 188–190, 196–197, 203, 219–233 Zychlinski, Franz, 92