Zupancic Oddonein.Pdf

The Odd One In Short Circuits Slavoj Zˇizˇek, editor The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek The Shortest Shadow:Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger Interrogation Machine:Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar Subjectivity and Otherness:A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, by Lorenzo Chiesa The Odd One In:On Comedy, by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ The Odd One In On Comedy Alenka Zupancˇicˇ TheMIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] .edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA . This book was set in Joanna and Copperplate bc by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka. The odd one in : on comedy / Alenka Zupancˇicˇ. p. cm. — (Short circuits) Includes bibliographical references. ---- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Comic, The. Comedy. I. Title. '.—dc To Martin Contents Series Foreword ix Introduction 2 I The Concrete Universal 11 The Absolute on the Couch 12 The Universal-at-Work 22 Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite 42 II Figures of Comedy 61 The Ego and the It 62 The Ego and the Ego 72 The other and the Other 88 III Conceptualizations 109 Another Turn of the Bergsonian Screw 110 Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical 128 Repetition 148 (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus 183 Enjoyment ex machina 184 Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? 200 Concluding Remarks 212 Notes 219 Bibliography 227 Series foreword A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, there- fore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that don’t usu- ally touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short-circuiting way,through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology,or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy,that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduc- tion of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent ix decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “un- thought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psycho- series foreword analysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological forma- tion, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy,religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics justifies this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections in the Freudian field”—of short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy,theology,and ideology. “Short Circuits” intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts a classic text, author,or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth. The basic crite- rion for the texts that will be published is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing— side of something he or she knew all the time. Slavoj Zˇizˇek The Odd One In Introduction It may come as little surprise to say that comedy is an extremely difficult subject of investigation—not only because of the multi- plicity of various techniques and procedures involved in its process, but also because this process is in constant motion. Indeed, this irresistible motion is one of the key features of comedy,which is why it seems so difficult to pin it down with concepts and definitions. Moreover, comedy lives in the same world as its definitions (in a much more emphatic sense than this could be said for other genres), and is quite capable of its own definitions as ma- terial to be submitted to further comic treatment, turned upside down, or inside out.... In this respect—and following Hegel on this point—the ar- gument of this book is that comic subjectivity proper does not reside in the subject making the comedy, nor in the subjects or egos that appear in it, but in this very incessant and irresistible, all- consuming movement. Comic subjectivity is the very movement of comedy.However, movement is not the whole story of comedy. Stumbling, interruptions, punctuations, discontinuities, all kinds of fixations and passionate attachments are the other side of this same movement, and constitute a—not exactly objective but, rather, object-related—facet of comedy.It is with the scissors of this double perspective that this essay ventures to conceptualize the phenomenon of comedy and of the comical. Philosophy’s relationship to comedy is not exactly a simple story, although it contains itself some elements of comedy, start- ing with the disappearance of the book that might have inaugu- rated philosophy’s more canonical interest in comedy. Thanks to Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel The Name of the Rose (and the movie based on it), everybody knows about the second book of Aris- totle’s Poetics, in which the philosopher discussed comedy and laughter, and which is unfortunately lost. Would philosophy’s often contemptuous attitude towards comedy be any different if it were not lost? Be this as it may, the plot of Eco’s story revolves around the “fact” that one copy of the book did survive in a me- dieval monastic library, where a fanatical monk, Jorge, has made 3 it his mission to prevent the rest of the world from learning about it and reading it. When he can no longer ensure this, he burns down the library and the book with it. Jorge is convinced that introduction laughter is Satan’s invention, undermining all firm religious be- liefs. If the contents of Aristotle’s book on comedy were to become generally known, this would destroy the very foundations of the Christian order. Jorge’s adversary and the hero of the story,the en- lightened monk William of Baskerville, defends laughter as an essential feature of humankind, seeing Christianity, as a cultural- intellectual enterprise, threatened precisely by fanaticism such as Jorge’s. Let me say immediately that this book does not share the ideological coordinates of this division, which is much too simplistic in its opposition between the rigid fanaticism of ideology and a playfully ironic ease as its worst enemy. Indeed, one can easily show that ironic distance and laughter often function as an inter- nal condition of all true ideology, which is characterized by the fact that it tends to avoid direct “dogmatic” repression, and has a firm hold on us precisely where we feel most free and autono- mous in our actions. This point has already been made apropos of Eco’s novel: Laughter is a condition of ideology. It provides us with the distance, the very space in which ideology can take its full swing. It is only with laughter that we become ideological subjects, withdrawn from the immediate pressure of ideological claims to a free enclave. It is only when we laugh and breathe freely that ideology truly has a hold on us—it is only here that it starts functioning fully as ideology,with the specifically ideological means, which are supposed to assure our free consent and the appearance of spontaneity, eliminating the need for the non-ideological means of outside constraint. (Dolar ,p.) It is very important to keep this point in mind, especially in times when freedom and free will, humor, a “positive attitude,” and a distance towards all ideologies have become the principal mode of the dominant ideology.The humanist-romantic presentation of comedy as intellectual resistance in the form of keeping a distance to all that is going on around us is not at all what will interest us in comedy. If a truly subversive edge of comedy exists—as I be- lieve it does—it is to be sought elsewhere. In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imper- ative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive—say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life.

Load more