Está en la página 1de 18

Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of Super-Laughter

Weeks, Mark.
The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 27, Spring 2004, pp. 1-17 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/nie.2004.0007

For additional information about this article


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v027/27.1weeks.html

Access Provided by University of Western Australia M209 at 04/26/11 10:10PM GMT

Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of Super-Laughter MARK WEEKS


They that are intent on great designs have not time to laugh. Thomas Hobbes1

here is no question that in the latter decades of the twentieth century philosophical, literary, and cultural studies were infected with something of a comic spirit. Postmodernism was identified with and through images of play, energy, and movement that sought to ceaselessly and joyfully throw into crisis our faith in the permanence of structures. The only thing that would be permanent now was the need for change that the ascendancy of desire itself as a cosmological principle was driving. Here, of course, postmodernist theory revealed its continuity with, and indeed its debt to, high modernist dynamismmost conspicuously, Nietzsches Dionysianism, Bergsons quasimystical lan vital, and Freuds energo-economics. Thus when Derrida announced the triumph of becoming, of endless desiring and jouissance, through his linguistic concepts of signifying force and diffrance, it was in Nietzsche that he found inspiration: we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.2 Desire and play were inseparable, and laughter was the privileged iconthe transcendental signifier, if you likeof that unruly force that drove us. Amid the excitement the celebration of difference and playful energy introduced, especially as it was reinforced by the not unrelated rise of Bakhtinianism, it was common to overlook the qualifying adjective in Derridas reference, that certain. It was just as easy, and perhaps convenient, to overlook the fact that Nietzsches laughing hero Zarathustra, from whom poststructuralist notions of Nietzschean laughter commonly derived, was, first, a fictional projection, and second, not a proponent of laughter in general. On the contrary, as I will attempt to show here, Nietzsches work is surprisingly consistent in revealing an anxiety toward laughter, and in this respect it shares ground with the philosophical mythologies of those other preeminent modernist

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 27, 2004 Copyright 2004 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

M ARK W EEKS

figures, Bergson and Freud, both of whom, not coincidentally, wrote extended treatises on the comic. Uncovering the source of that shared anxiety is not merely a matter of modernist intellectual history, since it reveals something important about our more recent postmodern past and presentspecifically, the truly ironic reality that amid the ubiquity of images of play and laughter, both in academia and popular culture, laughter had become increasingly ineffectual and genuine laughter increasingly difficult to access. This irony has been observed for some time, and at first glance an explanation seems straightforward enough. At the end of the last century, Milan Kundera observed how the expanding and increasingly intrusive commercial mediascape collapsed the boundary between the important and the frivolous. Serious events were packaged as spectacle, while entertainment was regarded with a ludicrous gravity, making it difficult to distinguish what it meant to be funny. A character in Kunderas novel Immortality (1991) remarks, Humour can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.3 Fredric Jameson had earlier identified much the same phenomenon when he remarked in postmodernity the ascendancy of pastiche, the uninhibited quoting and juxtaposition of different forms and styles, without laughter . . . without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.4 Both Jameson and Kundera discerned a lack of something comic theorists generally consider essential to laughter, the ability, amid the proliferation of difference, to recognize incongruity, to notice that somethinga hi-tech casino inside a glass simulation of an ancient Egyptian pyramid in the middle of the U.S.A., lets saydoesnt fit. That occlusion of the perception of incongruity by a spirit of proliferating difference does not, of course, derive from Derrida or Barthes or Kristeva or any of the other postmodern prophets of the desire myth. Rather, it comes from a broader cultural history. As Malcolm Bowie puts it, desire (which should be distinguished from the more modest, finite, and earthly demands of biological need) is the cosmological principle of our secular age,5 our new God, if you will, under the influence of an economic system requiring expansion and increased consumption. And it is in that realm that the predicament of laughter, and its relationship to Nietzsche, that early prophet of the religion of desire, are exposed. Nietzsches first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, was originally entitled On Greek Cheerfulness because it traced what the author perceived as an ancient cultural decline into happy satisfaction he identified with the dramatist Euripides (around 336 B.C.). Nietzsche equated a supposed degeneration of the Hellenic Tragedy, represented by Aeschylus and Sophocles, with the rise of Euripides and New Attic Comedy. Noting, quite accurately, that the comic had served an important function,

B EYOND A J OKE

along with the sublime in art, as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity, Nietzsche argued that such nausea should not be relieved but should be tragically overcome. He thus bemoaned the role of popular comedy in the cultural ascendancy of ready satisfaction, cheerfulness in a state of unendangered comfort, a womanish flight from seriousness and terror, this craven satisfaction with easy enjoyment (BT, 11). To understand the intensity of Nietzsches feeling toward popular comedy requires a knowledge of the history of comic theory that has (rather conveniently) not been particularly evident among those Nietzschean, post-Freudian, or neo-Bergsonian celebrants of playful desire that have emerged since the 1960s. This is not entirely surprising since two of the most important philosophical figures in the history of humor theory present analyses of laughter that are fundamentally at odds with the deployment of laughter as a privileged signifier of unruly libidinal or otherwise subjective energies/forces. The first of these figures is Kant, sometimes considered the father of the incongruity theory of laughter because of a section in The Critique of Judgement in which he attributes laughter to a collision of incompatible conceptual frameworks. Kant contended that comic laughter resulted when interference from a competing matrix momentarily interrupted the forward momentum of thought/discourse and thereby subverted futurity: Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing. (Das Lachen ist ein Affeckt aus der pltzlichen Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in nichts.)6 In the laughable text, according to Kant, a crescendo of expectancy and so of a certain excitation is produced in the lead up to a critical point at which an incompatible matrix or meaning intrudes upon the discourse to produce a kind of discursive impasse. It may not be immediately apparent how at odds this is with the attractive notion of laughter as signifying the release of unruly desires from bondage. But if we transpose (with minimal conceptual violence) Kants strained expectation into Derridean termsthat is, as the temporal component of diffrance, the signifying delay or deferralwe can see that what is being posited is what under the current cultural regime is unthinkable: the subversion not by, but of, desire (and signifying force). In this sense, laughter, as distinct from the play that precedes it, constitutes what might be best expressed as indiffrance, a term that, not accidentally, recalls the traditional notion of comic detachment.7 This is certainly how Schopenhauer, the other major philosopher commonly identified with incongruity theory and whose writing would directly influence the tragic philosophies of both Nietzsche and Freud, viewed the process of producing laughter. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer offered the most explicitly time-based theory of the comic, attributing the pleas-

M ARK W EEKS

ure in laughter to the defeat of conception, a temporal, discursive knowledge, by perception, or immediate, instinctive apprehension:
For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which everything that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself. It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended with no exertion. . . . [While, on the other hand,] it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness, they are the vehicle of our fears, our repentance, and all our cares.8

Schopenhauers model acutely described the pleasure in laughter as the effect of a subversion of temporal being and its endless deferral of gratification in the constant exertion of discursive consciousness. Laughter does not satisfy a specific desire, but the disruption of (past and future) tense itself produces a reduction in tension, momentarily relaxing the otherwise relentless dissatisfaction that extends the human, the uniquely temporal being, beyond the immediate and, in a sense, finite demands of biological need. Thus laughter momentarily accesses that world of satiable desire which according to Schopenhauers own tragic philosophy of an insufferable will is generally beyond recovery. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer was so devoted to his tragic view, and so surrounded by a nineteenth-century intellectual mistrust of frivolousness, that he was unable to follow up the implications for the cultural function of comic laughter in his discovery. Those implications were, however, acutely sensed by Nietzsche as he attempted to reassess and radically reinscribe Schopenhauers notion of will. Indeed, by viewing Schopenhauers temporal theory of laughter as background, we are able to better understand Nietzsches disdain for the rise of Attic comedy and the perceived continuation of that comic self-satisfaction in his own nineteenth-century Europe. Of the new comic atmosphere, Nietzsche would write: it is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to be responsible for, nothing great to strive for, and who does not value anything in the past or future higher than the present (BT, 11). This recalls the very similar insight and prejudice earlier expressed by Hobbes, the intuitive understanding that laughter in some sense collapses temporal consciousness and thereby represents a threat to narratives of historical progression. In fact, there is a sense in which laughter functions in an antithetical relationship with narrative in general, given that narrative is itself a temporal, and temporizing, phenomenon. Where Nietzsche departs from both Hobbes and Schopenhauer, and serves as an inspiration to poststructuralism, is in insisting that the will to dominate time from within should be expressed joyfully and not merely as a manifestation of duty or fate. Situated somewhere between Schopenhauer and

B EYOND A J OKE

Nietzsche in that regard is Bergson, whose narrative of creative evolution sought to synthesize the individualistic notion of a freely acting will with a mythological sense of destiny. Like Nietzsches Will to Power, Bergsons lan vital allowed individuals to perceive their own striving as consistent with a larger, and ultimately heroic, master-narrative that would redeem the individual life from the humiliation of its own mortality without acceding to a loss of personal sovereignty. Nietzsches contention that the individual will, along with the society it propels, is worth only as much as it is able to press upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal (BT, 23)a view that would be increasingly important to Nietzsches philosophy and would culminate in the notion of eternal recurrencewould find something of a counterpart in Bergsons ecstatic pronouncement that the whole of humanity, in space and time is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance, and clear the most formidable obstacles, even death.9 We should not exaggerate their kinship, but what the cultural currency these two philosophers held in poststructuralism reflects is an enormously optimistic faith in subjective energies overcoming mortality not by escaping or collapsing time but by heroically embracing it, which in both cases would have implications for the philosophers attitude to laughter. Gilles Deleuze would read in Bergson a logic of subjective multiplicities, a model of continuous, dynamic differentiation that is essentially positive and creative,10 and Paul Douglass, in his study of Deleuzes Bergsonism, would suggest a clear link to Derridas Nietzscheanism here when he argues that Bergsons vitalism remobilizes us by alerting us to the mobility of difference . . . reminds us that finality exists for us only in an infinitely continued postponementand here for Deleuze lies the germ also of diffrance as deferment.11 The key to maintaining and projecting this positive attitude toward the relentless postponementthe delay inhabiting a uniquely human discourse and orientation toward the futureis to render the experience of tension it engenders in unusually positive terms. Here a hierarchy of joy and pleasure is crucial. Thus Bergson writes, Pleasure and well-being are something, joy is more. For it is not contained in these, whereas they are virtually contained in joy. They mean, indeed, a halt or a marking time, while joy is a step forward.12 While the postmodernist philosophers of jouissance may eschew futuristic grand narratives, they share with their forebears the subordination of pleasure (which Freud equated with the diminution of stress and the absence of pain) to joy, a positive excitement, a creative form of tension. Nietzsche, in The Twilight of the Idols, would acclaim the great person, the bow with the great tension (TI, 38); Bergson, in Creative Evolution, equating vital being with intension (and intensity), a stultifying mechanism with exten-

M ARK W EEKS

sion, observes that the subject has only to let go its tensionmay we say to dtendin order to extend.13 Laughter appears to be the perfect example of this letting goand, as Freud points out, the Frenchman Dugas had described laughter as a dtente in the nineteenth century.14 It is no surprise, thenthough it has again been strategically downplayedthat in the closing passage of his famous essay on the comic, Laughter, Bergson directly expresses the problem and threat posed by laughter to the energetic mythology, noting of the one who laughs, He slackens in the attention that is due to life. He more or less resembles the absentminded. Maybe his will is here even more concerned than his intellect, and there is not so much a want of attention as a lack of tension.15 This failure of the will, this surrendering of the striving and duration (dur) that are fundamental to heroic vitalism, Bergson must ultimately find distasteful, representing as it does the beginnings of a curious pessimism16 that Nietzsche too, it will be recalled, had discerned in the cheerfulness of the slave. Of course, laughter is not really pessimistic (since that too implies a subjugation to temporal consciousness) but rather is lacking in the optimism that the heroic wills of both Nietzsche and Bergson required. But their recognition that comic laughter in its myriad contexts depends upon a subversion of that physiological tension that maintained temporal consciousness (the past and especially the future tense) was fundamentally correct. As Helmuth Plessner points out in his phenomenological study, laughter should not be conflated or confused with the texts and emotions that may proceed it: It is pleasurable as the release of a tension, which in the superabundance of joy, springs from the drive to movement, in titillation from the ambivalence of sexual excitation, in play from the intermediate state between freedom and constraint.17 It is difficult to underestimate the importance of acknowledging the common error we make in simply identifying laughter with contiguous themes and feelings. Laughter is not joy, and, as Freud himself had observed, it is not sexual excitation. Perhaps most important, especially with regard to the strange predicament of laughter in postmodernity, it is not play. In each case it is the collapsing of the tensions that inhabit those conditions and propel our movement through them. Laughter is an end: What is really of importance is that statements, people, things, or events stimulate [the audience/reader] to laugh . . . insofar as he can, or will, do nothing more with them, yet nevertheless gives expression to this impossibilityan expression suited to this being done with.18 In a culture of acceleration in which nothing is valued higher than limitless desire, an insatiability that drives us through time and shopping malls, it is no wonder that this defining characteristic of laughterand thus, in a sense, laughter itselfshould be swept to the margins. Studying the way that psychoanalysis has treated laughter over the past century since Freud pub-

B EYOND A J OKE

lished Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Franois Roustang claims that the prohibition against laughter is a prohibition against finishing, against establishing a term, a limit, a boundary.19 Roustang is referring specifically to a strategic blindness in psychoanalysis determined by its investment in a myth of unlimited desire, but it is no less applicable to a popular culture of which Baudrillard writes, there is no time for silence . . . images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption.20 It would seem that we are not merely uncomfortable with the interruption that is laughter, but we lack the language to interpret it. In an essay on laughters temporal disjunction entitled Laughing in the Meanwhile, Samuel Weber distinguishes the laughing body from the hysterical body as a subject of psychoanalytic study and notes the difficulty of making sense of the former. For the body laughing is far more difficult to assimilate to an economy and to a temporality of representation than is the hysterical body, which, as symptom, is still significant. Laughing in the meanwhile, the body is dislocated entstellt, but also: insignificant.21 So, laughter appears to resist discourse to some extent because it is itself a subversion of discourse and discursive desire, yet we are perhaps at least able to describe laughter in these terms. When Richard Simon asserts that laughter is ejacula not of semen, but of psychic energy . . . the ejaculation of not yet formed words,22 he recalls (whether consciously or not is unclear) Derridas eroticization and temporization of language through the notion of the signifying delay, perhaps justifying my own earlier use of the term indifference to mark the subversion of that delay. In this way, poststructuralisms acknowledgment of desire and temporality in language may actually serve to clarify, if unwittingly, the way comic laughter functions to subvert the force of language and undermine force in general. While the more ecstatic strains of poststructuralism have generally preferred to gloss over the implications here, it is worth noting that Roland Barthes articulated something of the antagonism between laughter and jouissance in The Pleasure of the Text. In a passage consistent with temporized comic theory, Barthes draws a crucial distinction between the playful text of bliss/jouissance and the laughter response. The blissful text is celebrated for its capacity to retain radical ambiguities, a ceaseless oscillation across meanings, while it never succumbs to the good conscience (and bad faith) of parody (of castrating laughter, of the comical that makes us laugh); the blissful text, he later emphasizes, contains the comical that does not make us laugh, meaning not just parody but the laughable in general, since comic laughter requires a collision and consequent radical deceleration (termed a cognitive catastrophe by John Paulos23), whereas the blissful text is excited and propelled by the recognition of difference. Barthes acknowledges, especially in the image of castration, that the laughter response is perhaps contiguous, but

M ARK W EEKS

not therefore identical with the comical or playful text. He implies that laughter in some respect represents a limitation, or at least an interruption, of the endless semiosis of comic play and signifying force. Laughter is an instance of what he refers to as a loss of verbal desire.24 Barthes text explicitly celebrates Nietzsches absolute flow of becoming25 and like Nietzsche, and indeed Bergson, Barthes senses the danger posed by laughter to the joyfully optimistic mythology of desire. Nietzsche and Bergson had sought to identify psychophysiological well-being with their myths of willful futurism, yet laughter popularly and ubiquitously produced a sense of well-being (more recently supported by numerous physiological studies) precisely by subverting the tension of futurity. Both philosophers wrestled with this problem and I believe it influenced the progression of their thought far more than has been commonly acknowledged. Moreover, the strategies they adopted would contribute significantly to the way laughter was conceptualized in philosophy and cultural studies at the end of the twentieth century. For Bergson, the problem would lead to Laughter (Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique), an extended work on the comic that would attempt to recuperate the laughter response within his decidedly temporal metaphysics. First, as Nietzsche had done in The Birth of Tragedy, Bergson subordinates the comic to the tragic, equating the former with the common herd26 and a degraded form of art: it turns its back upon art, which is a breaking away from society and a return to pure nature,27 where nature has a specific meaning inseparable from Bergsons idealistic vitalism. It is because it lacks faith in something beyond the social that laughter is ultimately regarded as displaying a curious pessimism, but it is here that a crucial leap of faith is made, quite against the logic of the essay. Bergson asserts that Here as elsewhere, nature has utilized evil with a view to good,28 because Laughter is above all a corrective.29 When we laugh, Bergson earlier contends, though the impulse is negative, the effect of laughter is to chastise the absence of psychic tension in a comical other and lapses of attention in language itself.30 Bergsons unfounded assertion has been criticized by Alonso Myers, who remarks the faulty intellectual analysis informing a corrective theory of laughter, and by A. R. Lacey: While . . . laughter could have the function he assigns to it, he gives no real reason for saying that it does have it.31 There is a reason, of course, but it is mythopoeic rather than analytical. It is critical for the tragically driven and yet uniquely joyful master-narrative proposed by Bergson that laughter be incorporated rather than assume the more threatening, but perhaps more seductive, position of a pleasurably evil outside. Because creative evolution was a holistic metaphysical narrativeand so disallowed an outsidelaughter would be recuperated by projecting the evil dtente onto a lazy, comical other, an objectified comical subjectivity within

B EYOND A J OKE

the evolving individual and society that would be gradually overcome through the productive chastisement that laughter now represented. Beginning from a similar anxiety concerning laughter, Nietzsches own responses would develop in the course of his career toward, through, and beyond the hopeful projection of laughter Bergson would later offer. In Human, All-Too-Human, published gradually in two volumes and three parts between 1878 and 1880, Nietzsche shifts from the overheated romanticism of The Birth of Tragedy toward a cooler tone that produced a more objective assessment of laughters function. While erroneously conflating laughter and play, Nietzsche picks up the thinking of Kant and Schopenhauer when he observes that laughter occurs when the expected (which usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly (HH, 213). As in the earlier work, the comic is conceived principally in opposition to the tragic, where man passes swiftly from great, enduring wantonness and high spirits into great fear and anguish. Comedy represented the oppositea sudden movement from fear into wantonness: The anxious crouching creature springs up, greatly expandsman laughs. This transition from momentary anxiety to short-lived exuberance is called the comic (169). Laughter suggests to Nietzsche a momentary release of social constraints, a sudden glory, as Hobbes calls it,32 and like Hobbes, he ascribes to this experience a comparatively negative valuein part because of the apparently plebeian conditions of its occurrence. There is a clear sense of regret in his observation that since great, enduring wantonness and high spirits is much rarer among mortals than occasions for fear, there is much more of the comic than the tragic in the world (ibid.). What is seen to be sacrificed in the moment of laughter is the tragic, the tensed and enduring spirit that distinguishes the heroic individual. Again, Nietzsche equates laughter with the absence of will of the common people It is the pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia (213) and explicitly distinguishes the relaxation produced in the expression of laughter from the spiritual smile attending the experience of joy: The more joyful and secure the spirit becomes, the more man unlearns loud laughter (173). Nietzsche is almost certainly correct in distinguishing joy from laughter, in viewing laughter as an equilibrating response rather than simply an icon or index of joy, even if, as Plessner observes, we commonly distort that relationship. Yet as he further developed his unique and ultimately highly influential vision of joyful tragedy, he came upon the problem posed by his marginalizing laughter in relation to a joyful mythology, given that laughtereven if mistakenlyis typically identified with joy. This would lead to a strategy that Bergson would later adopt, to recognize laughter while subjugating it to a tragic-heroic mythology as a means to a very different end. The Gay Science (1882) marks a clear shift in Nietzsches approach to the subject in this respect. Where before he had tended to denigrate laughter as

10

M ARK W EEKS

the enemy of heroic striving, here he would seek, in the name of an evolutionary consciousness that would find an echo in Bergsonism, to incorporate it: When the proposition, the species is everything, one is always none has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only gay science will then be left (GS, 1). It is a long step from Nietzsches inference that Even laughter may yet have a future (ibid.) to Pete Gunters contention that with certain qualifications Nietzsches thought may be said to comprise not a tragic but a comic philosophy.33 Nietzsche regrets that up to the present all heroic believers in the future, every one of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason, and nature: the short tragedy always gave way again and returned into the eternal comedy of existence (ibid.) determined by the individual humans knowledge of mortality. At the end of the book we read of the new inhuman, the new mans joyful destruction of the past with parody: it is only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins (GS, 382). Laughter is nothing like an end here, but rather an instrument, representing an event whereby static structures might be seen to collapse and liberate the explicitly tragic force of becoming and overcoming. Like Bergson, Nietzsche is willing a function for laughter that would allow it to be thoroughly subsumed and subjugated within his heroic narrative. An important point emerges here that again tended to be submerged in some of the more hopeful intellectual deployments of the image of laughter in the twentieth century. The idea that laughter might liberate energy, while it seems intuitively right given the obvious kinesics of the body in laughter, does not automatically imply an energized will. The surrealist Georges Bataille, following Nietzsche, would envisage a laughter that sent shock waves through and eventually destroyed the monolithic, pyramidal structure of society. Laughter intuits the truth, he would claim, that our will to arrest being is damned. and that Man cannot, by any means, escape insufficiency. 34 Interestingly, this is a notion that Derrida would pick up in his essay on Batailles challenge to Hegel, where Derrida would claim that the word laughter itself must be read in a burst, and places it alongside other Bataillian images of dangerous excess: drunkenness, erotic effusion, sacrificial effusion, poetic effusion, heroic behaviour, anger, absurdity (Derrida is quoting Batailles Methode de Meditation).35 Laughter is here a privileged symbol, a transcendental signifier, of limitless desire, the interminable delay, a chronic insufficiency. But well before Barthes had delivered a very different, and more readily defensible, view of the relationship between laughter and desire/dissatisfaction, Jean-Paul Sartre too had expressed a deep skepticism

B EYOND A J OKE

11

toward Batailles romantic idealization of the laughter image, observing the dearth of evidence of a genuinely revolutionary laughter and the comparative ease with which laughter is accommodated by the readily satisfied mainstream. One could not so easily overlook the social reality, Sartre noted, the fact that Conservatives excel in it.36 While laughter ultimately belongs to neither the left nor the right of politics, there is indeed ample support within comic theory for the view that laughter, as a subversion of temporality, is fundamentally at odds with revolutionary futurism. That problematic returned with the brilliant rise of Bakhtinianism following the emergence of the Russian writer in the West (in part through the agency of Julia Kristeva) from the late 1960s. Mikhail Bakhtins evocative return to Rabelais and the ancient carnival as a model of comic destruction of social hierarchy and liberation of communal energies swept through university literature departments and across academic boundaries. But by the end of the millennium, the libidinal ecstasy had spent itself, perhaps because literature departments themselves were under attack, perhaps because Bakhtins imagery of comic revolution, born under vertical Stalinist oppression, was less readily deployed in opposition to the already highly motile, playfully libidinal capitalist hegemony of postmodernity. More fundamentally, however, there was the gradual revelation of the willed blindness inhabiting the Bakhtinian miracle, the suppression of the temporal limitations of both the comic and the carnival. As the Marxist writer Angela Carter, whose own fiction was almost unanimously declared Bakhtinian at that time, observed, The whole point of the feast of fools is that things went on as they did before, after it stopped.37 Likewise, Umberto Eco, who thematized the comic in his novel The Name of the Rose, when he turned a critical semiological eye to carnival, referred explicitly to Bakhtin (Bachtin) when he argued that Carnival can exist only as an authorized transgression and argued that the temporal boundaries of carnival are precisely what secure its license: the ancient religious carnival was limited in time.38 What Bakhitinians tended to overlook was that the starting point of apparent carnival liberation was the reality of its ending, and Eco noted that this was also true of individual laughably comic events, leading him to the assertion that comedy and carnival are not instances of real transgressions. He even went so far as to conclude that If there is a possibility of transgression it lies in humor [which his taxonomy equates with the absence of the end produced by laughter] rather than in the comic.39 It will be recalled that Nietzsche had suggested much the same in Human, AllToo-Human. I think there is sufficient evidence that at least as early as The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche was at some level conscious of the problem posed by laughter as a subversion of time. Unlike Bergson, however, Nietzsche, with his rigorous skepticism, was unable to so optimistically reinterpret the laugh-

12

M ARK W EEKS

ter of the present in order to serve that future. More transparently than some of those who would follow, Nietzsche conceded that as he wrote laughter did not have the function he would like for it. We should note the repeated perhaps he uses in referring to the laughter of joyful wisdom and the fact that he immediately observes, For the present, things are still quite different: To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truthto do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius for that (GS, 1). To make laughter useful to the new master-narrative will require an act of great will, then, not simply a hopeful reinterpretation of the present. That required rhetorical leap would be at the core of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (188385). Yet, because of the tendency to read laughter as indicative rather than functional, and to overlook its temporal implications, the importance of laughterand especially the necessity for Nietzsche to reinvent laughter to suit the temporal philosophy of eternal recurrencehas generally been overlooked. And yet, to the extent that there is a plot in the philosophical novel, it could be seen as at least in part driven by the inciting event of the townsfolk laughing at Zarathustras philosophy: There they stand . . . there they laugh. They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for those ears (Z:1 Zarathustras Prologue). The laughter response constitutes the wall between the visionary philosopher and the common folk, and it is easy for most of us, even as common folk ourselves, to understand how crippling and infuriating laughter can be as a means of stonewalling communication. This is because laughter undermines diffrance not only in its spatial aspect (interpreting difference as incongruity, incompatible otherness), but more thoroughly by collapsing the delay/deferral of significatory desire (what Derrida calls the temporization of difference). The laughter Zarathustra confronts, then, is so devastating and sends him back into isolation, because it is ranged not simply against the philosopher, but against the defining element of the philosophical quest, the attempt to embrace the future/desire/will in the face of existential absurdity. As Heidegger would write, and Deleuze would affirm, the overfulness that is the object of Zarathustras great longing is the inexhaustible permanence of becoming.40 The diffrance of laughter is the nemesis of a will that cannot exist without the existential leap into futurity: On the tree Future, we build our nest (Z:2 On the Rabble); On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future (Z:2 On the Tarantulas); Is not something thronging and pushing in youmans future? (Z:4 On the Higher Man). Nietzsches problem with laughter at this point is fascinating because he was clearly aware (as were Shakespeares fools) that laughter, since it collapsed time and thereby undermined teleology, was at home with the eternal comedy of existential absurdity. The challenge Nietzsche had set himself,

B EYOND A J OKE

13

however, was to confront and then overcome absurdity, not to make peace (or a dtente) with it through the pleasurable and potentially ubiquitous exit from time laughter provided. He had already, specifically in The Gay Science, configured laughter as a temporary means of destruction, as a comic device within his grand tragic narrative, but social reality must have shown him how difficult it would be to incorporate laughter as an instrument of a higher purpose in that way: the laughter of the common folk was doggedly going nowhere not simply out of stubbornness but because of the temporally subversive condition of laughter itself. On the other hand, The Birth of Tragedy had shown him that to attack laughter, which as a signifier was identified with play and joy, was to risk rendering his own work, despite its verbal playfulness, as overly serious, so that he himself might be seen to be overtaken by the spirit of gravity. This lead to one of Nietzsches most breathtaking rhetorical gambits. Rather than attack laughter, he challenges his readers, through Zarathustra, to will a new kind of laughter, one that will not collapse the temporality of becoming and the will to redeem time through the narrative of special advancement: Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? (Z:1 Reading and Writing). It is of absolute significance that the apotheosis of this laughter is furnished at the moment when Zarathustra is confronted with the image of the shepherd and the snake, often interpreted as an epiphanic vision of the existential leap into the inexhaustible permanence of becoming. No longer shepherd, no longer humanone changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now! (Z:3 Vision and Riddle). A mythical species of laughter, then, a laughter that would defy the collapse of time in everyday laughter and thereby launch a joyfully unstoppable temporal momentuma kind of perpetual motion machinebecomes the holy grail of the quest narrative. And in the final part of the story, Zarathustra announces that through his lonely wandering and suffering he has finally attained that grail: The crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I found strong enough for this today (Z:4 Higher Man). It should be emphasized here that this laughter is experienced only by Zarathustra, and that Zarathustra is a fictional character. With this narrative, Nietzsche imaginatively conceived a futuristic laughter, a laughter that not only supported the future tense (and tension) but was actually located in that same future and so could not be challenged in the present. To counter laughters real threat to futurity, absolute desire and will, Nietzsche projected a transcendental laughter that would become the object of desire, a driving

14

M ARK W EEKS

force of the will. Then he challenged the reader to take up the quest: learn to laugh away over yourselves! (Z:4 Higher Man). Nietzsches strategy is, in a sense, to neutralize laughters fundamental indifference by rendering it as a privileged marker of hierarchical difference. He repeatedly alludes to this higher laughter throughout Zarathustra and will deliver the same message in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): I would go so far as to venture an order of rank among philosophers according to the rank of their laughterrising to those capable of golden laughter (BGE, 294). There are gradations of laughter on the way to the summit of the bermensch, but always there is a hierarchy based on laughter as it is (the real and present) and laughter as it should be (the prospective, future). This is born out in discussions of Nietzsches vision of the comic, though too little has been said about the reasons Nietzsche needed to construct this division. George McFadden, in his analysis of Nietzschean values, for example, suggests there are two possible types of comedy, based either on the Will to Power or on its frustration,41 and presumably two types of laughter (possible, but not necessarily existent) are to be identified with these. John Lippitt argues that in addressing Zarathustra, we need initially to consider two kinds of laughter, the laughter of the height, and the laughter of the herd, and the question of how the former may be achieved.42 That division and that question constitute the interrogative that motivates the Nietzschean narrative, the issue of how one is to attain the summit marked by a sacred laughter, to laugh in a new and superhuman way (BGE, 294). Interestingly, we can read the ecstatic Bakhtinian narrative as a kind of reverse, mirror image of this. Where Nietzsche had promoted a potential individual over the contemporary masses, Bakhtin would exult a potentially revolutionary community over the supposed inertia of the authoritarian or bourgeois individual. For both, the critical division is that between a present reality and a potential future; and for both, the shifting of the image of laughter from one temporal position to the other through the projection of a superlaughter is absolutely crucial, even if, as comic theory reveals, it is difficult to objectively support. Stallybrass and White remark of Bakhtins writing (specifically of his essay on Rabelais and Gogol), It is difficult to disentangle the generous but willed idealism from the descriptively accurate passages.43 Yet that blurring was vital to the transformation of Bakhtins rigorous formalist insight, through the projection of an idealized Rabelaisian past onto an ideal future, into something resembling an academic cult. Nietzsches writing, often devastatingly incisive, permits a similar slippage. If there is a difference, it is that where laughter is concerned the willful subordination of the real is perhaps more openly and consistently pursued through the Germans underlying philosophy of the will to narrate (forcefully fictionalize) ones life.

B EYOND A J OKE

15

My own concern here has been primarily with the effect of such rhetorical approaches to, and deployments of, laughter. Eventually, perhaps one of the most important legacies of the various modernist attempts to willfully incorporate laughter was that it began to seem that laughter could be forced to be whatever we wanted it to be. It perhaps felt intuitively right that laughter, once it was mistakenly conflated with play, should itself be viewed as a free-floating signifier. Ironically, we can see, in retrospect, that as the concept of play grew in currency with the ascendancy of the postmodern in thought, art, and economic culture, laughter became a privileged signifier of playful energies, and as such a fetishized object of desire. Unfortunately, this elevation and manipulation of laughter as a signifier, whether in academia or in popular culture and advertising, disguised both its real positive effects and its marginalization in social reality. Laughter, as a momentary subversion of time, desire, and signifying force, and as a way of thereby reasserting the satiable body, was being run over by an economically driven culture of endless desire and intensifying hyperactivity that was increasingly intolerant of interruptions and dismissive of the existential importance of a genuine possibility of satisfaction. This was a marketplace carnival that must never, according to the dominant economic logic of consumption, expansion, and acceleration, end. That Nietzsche might have contributed in some small way to this suppression of laughters function as a potentially liberating temporal collapse and subversion of an increasingly insatiable desire is itself ironic, given that he would surely have been scathing of a present rush that is, if Baudrillard is right,44 nothing less than an abdication of the will. Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University WORKS CITED (Nietzsche in-text references only)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. Paul V. Cohn. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. . Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. . The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. . Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche, 1954. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. . The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967; and trans. Shaun Whiteside. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.

NOTES
1. Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, 11 vols. (London: Bohn, 1845), 4:455. 2. Jacques Derrida, Diffrance, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 27. 3. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 372.

16

M ARK W EEKS

4. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 114. 5. Malcom Bowie, Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Ficiton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3. 6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 199. 7. See Mark Weeks, Laughter, Desire, and Time, in Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 15:4 (2002). 8. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1989), 280. 9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911), 286. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Urzone, 1988), 103. 11. Paul Douglass, Deleuzes Bergson: Bergson Redux, in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 377. 12. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan, 1935), 45. 13. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 250. 14. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 147. 15. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 196. 16. Bergson, Laughter, 199. 17. Helmut Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 113. 18. Ibid., 139. 19. Franois Roustan, How Do You Make a Paranoiac Laugh? MLN 102 (1987): 708. 20. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 12. 21. Samuel Weber, Laughing in the Meanwhile, MLN 102 (1987): 706. 22. Richard Simon, The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1985), 230. 23. John Paulos, Mathematics and Humor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 75107. 24. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1975), 15. 25. Ibid., 60. 26. Bergson, Laughter, 151. 27. Ibid., 171. 28. Ibid., 199. 29. Ibid., 197. 30. Ibid., 104 31. A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London: Routledge, 1989), 196. 32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in The English Works, 3:46. 33. Pete A. Gunter, Nietzschean Laughter, Sewanee Review 76 (1968): 493. 34. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 91. 35. Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 255.

B EYOND A J OKE

17

36. Jean-Paul Sartre, Un Nouveau Mystique, in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 170 (my translation). 37. Angela Carter, interviewed by Lorno Sage, in New Writing, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke (London: Minerva, 1992), 188. 38. Umberto Eco, The frames of comic freedom, in Carnival, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 6. 39. Ibid., 8. 40. Martin Heidegger, Who Is Nietzsches Zarathustra? trans. Bernd Magnus, in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1985), 77. 41. George McFadden, Discovering the Comic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 187. 42. John Lippitt, Nietzsche, Zarathustra, and the Status of Laughter, in The British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 39. 43. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 10. 44. See Jean Baudrillard, The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 20719.

También podría gustarte