Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy
2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.4.2.0287
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoThis collection presents a traversing across the theories of Jacques Lacan that moves toward theories about comic art and comic laughter, but, like the arrow in Zeno's paradox, never quite arrives. The title suggests this scenario, for the volume of essays is surely about Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis but not much about its third term, “comedy.” At least, not about comedy as a genre, as in stage comedy, though certain plays are mentioned and even analyzed. Rather than “comedy,” maybe “jouissance” should have been the third term, but in any case the basic objects of study in the essays are human subjectivity and the psychoanalytic method for explaining it. Sigmund Freud taught everyone that jokes are momentary glimpses into the unconscious, and that insight serves as keystone for the commentary on comic art and comic laughter found in this collection. Lacan built on and revised Freudian theory, but that task works as iteration answering a basic question: how do the psychoanalytic method and theory explain the comic propensities of the human psyche?The essays are grouped into three topics: “The Laughing Cure,” investigating the “salubrious nature of laughter” (17), “Comedy on the Couch,” examining “canonical comedic and satirical literary forms” (17), and “He who Laughs Last, Laughs Last,” which is a stand-alone short epilogue by Simon Critchley entitled “Repetition, Repetition, Repetition: Richard Prince and the Three Rs.” There are a dozen essays in all, too many for a full accounting, so I begin with the introduction and then move to selected articles from both sections as representative of the work overall, and finish with a few words about Critchley's effort.The introduction by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler is short but has a certain density nevertheless, which results from what arguably is the primary attraction of the collection, their claim of an intersection between psychoanalytic theory and theory about comic art and comic laughter (what I call The Comic). Complicating this basic claim for a substantial intersection is the way that the psychoanalytic side is divided into Freudian and Lacanian propositions and also how the practical dimension of clinical settings is inserted to suggest how the talking cure might operate as the laughing cure. More layering occurs when the editors add theory about The Comic, though we never quite arrive at any in-depth discussion of that theory: thus my invoking Zeno's paradox. For instance, in a psychoanalytical mode they move from the punning potential of language and the human habit of joking to stage comedies and their themes of love, and then to something like a basic comic rhythm. Here, one might expect Susanne Langer's idea of comic rhythm and life force, memorably represented by the indomitable forward motion of the buffoon, to be mentioned. However, Langer is not cited. Then the editors turn to the theme of power, which means comedy becomes satire, its subversive component. Found in stage comedies, these elements are familiar enough for longtime readers of this journal, but we are given no theorizing from this literary side. Instead, they segue quickly into the psychoanalytic aspect of the intersection, arguing that the punning resources of language employed in plays allow for equivocal descriptions of symptoms by an analysand and witty interventions by analysts in clinical settings. Stage comedy's perennial theme of love becomes a discussion of desire reduced to the death drive and the prominence of the phallus in Lacan's work.Finally, they argue that comic laughter signifies progress in therapy—the lifting of repression—a claim that ignores theory from other disciplines. Laughter for the editors therefore denotes the Lacanian Real, the limits of the signification that underpins the other two domains of Lacan's system, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Nevertheless, intersections are possible. For example, Georges Bataille's philosophy of nonknowing (“non-savoir”) in his analysis of comic laughter presents a similar scheme suggesting an ineffable realm. Indeed, there are other similar theoretical concepts one could draw on to frame comic laughter, such as Roger Caillois's concept of paidia as fundamentally unruly. However, the arrow never arrives.Claiming to display how the discourse that surrounds comic art and comic laughter might intersect with the discourse of psychoanalysis, the editors in their introduction wish to stress the centrality of that intersection for Lacan as his career unfolded. Thus for Lacan, “dreams, failure, and laughter are attributes specific to the speaking subject” [and] “laughter is at the origin of the ego” (3). Late in his career, he came to believe that comedy (understood most broadly) was the fast lane to the unconscious, not tragedy, as suggested by Freud's use of Oedipus or Lacan's own earlier use of Hamlet. Lacan is famous for his axiom that the unconscious is structured like a language, but reading the introduction, one might surmise that the phrase should change to “language is structured like a joke,” with an inevitable polysemic quality that resembles the two scripts offered in a joke that are (apparently) resolved by a punchline. A number of scholars who find links between postmodernism and comic art, for example, Jerry Flieger, Kirby Olson, Susan Purdie, and Fred Miller Robinson propose something similar. Yet the introduction does not mention the work of these theorists. Again, the ostensible aim of the argument, to demonstrate an intersection between The Comic and psychoanalysis by walking the reader through the theory of psychoanalysis does not reach its target.Perhaps most intriguing is the first section of the collection, which focuses on the phenomenon of laughter as well as its representation. In “Sarah's Laughter: Where Babies and Humor Come From,” Manya Steinkoler uses the biblical story of Sarah to explore the mysteries of pregnancy, fertility, and sexual reproduction. Laughter in her reading presents the limit of signification—the limit of the phallus in Lacanian terms (or non-savoir in Bataille's)—and thus it suggests lack and absence. For Steinkoler, Sarah's laughter is not about reproduction, even though the baby will be named Isaac (“he who laughs”), nor does she mock God. Rather, her laughter signifies the pleasure of wonder and surprise, a kind of feminine jouissance.Patricia Gherovici, in “Laughing About Nothing: Democritus and Lacan,” follows a comment by Lacan in one of his seminars about the famous Greek thinker, who was known as “the laughing philosopher,” with two questions: not just what was he laughing about but what kind of laughter was it? The answer is Lacan's formulation for the French word “jouissance,” an ambiguous mix of pleasure and pain (61). Latching onto a famous neologism by Democritus, Lacan spins an intricate analysis (reproduced by Gherovici) arguing that laughter for the Greek philosopher is not “perhaps nothing” but rather “not nothing” (64), that is, about the “mightily absent object of psychoanalysis” (65), Lacan's “object a.” The key point: this absence (rien) can lead to laughter (rire). The essay then moves to Gherovici's intricate analysis of a second reference by Lacan to Democritus that includes a look at the logic of trauma, understood as conceptual and linguistic turbulence, which provides the means for the analyst to break through symptomatic repetition presented by the analysand. That breakthrough can be signaled by laughter, an idea Gherovici demonstrates with a narration of one of her case studies that closes the essay.Scholars who approach comic art from a literary perspective might be disappointed with the second section of the collection and its readings of literary texts because the texts essentially function as vehicles for Lacanian theory. For example, in Geoff Boucher's “Psychoanalysis and Tragicomedy: Measure for Measure after Žižek's Lacanian Dialectics,” tragicomedy arises when the Symbolic order loses its authority, but a new order has not taken its place. Tragicomedy understood as a “quintessentially modern, contested mode” (159) becomes the response to an absurd universe. In modernity, master signifiers become replaceable as the divine right of kings gives way to the rights of man, as metaphysical cosmology gives way to the public sphere. Boucher uses Žižek to explain the reversals of desire and law in the play with a case-studies approach to specific characters: Angelo, Isabella, Lucio, and Vincentio. Boucher reads the process of ego and superego formation through the Oedipus complex within cultural and historical formations/events—the Reformation and the Counterreformation—so that the play becomes a cultural parable of the psychodynamics of Calvinism.While Boucher's essay has the merit of using psychoanalysis to read a stage comedy as a conceptual door into larger historical contexts, “Comedy and The Agency of the Letter in A Midsummer's Night Dream,” by Matthew Sharpe, narrows its analysis of the play into a revelation of the workings of psychoanalytic theory in the idiom of Lacan, specifically the concept of the agency of the letter. In A Midsummer's Night Dream, the agency of the letter means that, in the precincts of the play's nocturnal woodland that clearly stands for a subject's precultural and natural drives—namely, the unconscious—the unconscious works “artfully.” Thus the woodland does not represent a culture-free nature (there can be no such realm) but rather a different culture, one free from normative linguistic law: an upside-down culture that enables oneiric revels (137). In this realm, Puck represents the unconscious primary processes in dream work (146–47). Sharpe's focus on Lacan's agency of the letter concept seems tailor made for language-heavy texts like Shakespeare's comedies that feature much wordplay. However, the lack of any acknowledgment of the rich theory in historical and anthropological investigations about the festive spirit or carnival that has been shown to inform not just Shakespeare's work, or even comic art in general, but also traditional and preindustrial societies is noticeable. Sharpe's essay makes clear that the collection's analyses are discipline specific rather than interdisciplinary, despite the premise of the introduction.The epilogue by Simon Critchley returns to the most familiar terrain for psychoanalysis: jokes, “especially the hackneyed and the slightly obscene” (238), to claim that The Comic has the logic of repetition. However, Critchley broadens that claim into a larger one with a focus on the work of the painter Richard Prince: “Art is a repetitive mechanism that functions through theft, pilfering, sampling, forgery, and copying” (239). For Critchley, repetition is not sameness; rather, it is displacement and transformation, even decomposition. What Critchley sees beneath uniqueness is a doubling he associates with Henri Bergson, Charles Baudelaire, and (yes) Yogi Bear, who always says, “Boo-Boo.” This doubling represents an ironic self-awareness in the repetition (reenactments, fakes) of art production, with this ultimate takeaway: the illusion of reality becomes the reality of illusion (240). The best jokes therefore are the ones that trouble and unsettle, producing laughter that sticks in the throat, a Samuel Beckett laugh more than a James Joyce laugh.These essays suggest the type of investigation featured in Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy. Because psychoanalysis functions as a kind of interpretation, because the talking cure reworks the analysand's spoken text to produce another meaning, because the clinical vignette can be treated like a literary narrative, the conceptual premise for those processes in this collection might then be understood as primarily a hermeneutic of Lacanian texts. Thus the essays resemble an exegetical series from devotees who have mastered the idiom of psychoanalysis in its playfulness with language, a playfulness authorized at multiple levels by the primary texts, whether those texts are literary or clinical or Lacan's seminars. As Matthew Sharpe suggests with his gloss of “translation,” these essays are a “reparsing of an original text into a foreign tongue” (145), a rewriting into another set of signifiers within a particular disciplinary idiom. Because: agency of the letter rules. The essays read as the discovery of comic parables of Lacanian discourse wrested from a variety of texts, the essays performing the talking cure in print. If one decides that Lacanian psychology could be an intriguing way to approach comic art and comic laughter, then Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy stages a conversation worth a listen.
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