{"id":12767,"date":"2014-04-17T12:27:39","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T16:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12767"},"modified":"2020-11-22T16:19:51","modified_gmt":"2020-11-22T21:19:51","slug":"zupancic-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/04\/17\/zupancic-comedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Zupan\u010di\u010d comedy #2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d. “The ‘Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It.” Lacan The Silent Partners<\/em>. Edited by Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, New York and London: Verso. 2006. 171-197.<\/p>\n

The Odd One In On Comedy.<\/em> Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008<\/p>\n

In psychoanalysis the main problem does not lie simply in the subject becoming conscious of her unconsciousness, of all that (often painfully) determines her actions and experiences.<\/p>\n

This is insufficient: the main problem is precisely this unconsciousness is embodied outside ‘herself’, in the manner of rituals of her conduct, speech, relations to others \u2014 in certain situations that keep ‘happening’ to her.<\/p>\n

In short, it is not simply that in analysis the subject has to shift her position (or even ‘adapt’ herself);<\/p>\n

the major part of the analytic work consists precisely in shifting the ‘external practices’, in moving all those ‘chickens’ in which the subject’s unconsciousness (and her relation to herself) are externalized.<\/p>\n

And one of the major obstacles that can occur in analysis is precisely that the subject can become all too eager to change herself and her perception fo the world, convinced that in analysis she will experience a kind of intimate revelation on account of which everything will be different and easier when she re-enters the world.<\/p>\n

In other words, the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to  <\/span>put it in Hegel\u2019s terms, the subject\u2019s consciousness of herself is embodied, materialized as something that still does not know itself as consciousness).<\/p>\n

In this case, belief in the Other (in the modern form of believing that the Other does not know) is precisely what helps to maintain the same state of things, regardless of all subjective mutations and permutations.<\/p>\n

The subject\u2019s universe will really change only at the moment when she attains the knowledge that the Other knows (that it does not exist).<\/p>\n

What Lacan and Hegel share in this respect is that they both take this dimension of the Other extremely seriously \u2014 not as a subjective illusion or spell that could be broken simply by saying out loud that \u2018the Other doesn\u2019t exist\u2019 (just consider how this [nowadays] common theoretical mantra coexists perfectly well with all sorts of secret or not-so-secret beliefs), but as something which, despite its nonexistence, has considerable material effects.  Yet they also share their resistance to the opposite move: that of elevating the Other to the dignity of an impenetrable Otherness which, when facing the subject, becomes, for example, the touchstone of the ethical.<\/p>\n

What can be so traumatic about (encountering) Otherness is its dimension of Sameness. Precisely by being the same<\/i>, the Other is not reducible to the subject. What is at stake here is not the identity of the Otherness but, rather, the Otherness of identity itself. Other(ness) has its place in the very gap that separates or prevents any identity\/sameness from coinciding with itself in any immediate way.<\/p>\n

This is why, for Lacan, the real point at which something in this relationship can be effectively shifted is not the abolition of Otherness, or its absorption into the subject, but the coincidence of the lack in the subject with the lack in the Other.<\/p>\n

[In other words, what is needed is the encounter of the two entities at a very precise (or precisely right) point of their topology. 17 Odd One]<\/p>\n

This is a short circuit of internal external, not an elminination of one or othe other. For this short circuit or local covering over of two to occur, work on the subject, as an internal work on consciousness, is not enough; a work on the Other is also needed. In psychoanalysis, the condition of this work on the other is transference<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And transference is ultimately nothing but the<\/strong> subject\u2019s trust in her own sameness or identity, working outside her, in the Other<\/span><\/strong>. This trust or \u2018credit\u2019 is needed, because the subject has no immediate control over what her sameness does, and how it speak in this exteriority. 174<\/p>\n

In this feature we could recognize a properly comic dimension of analytic experience. I am referring to the autonomy of the (subject\u2019s) sameness that is operating \u201cout there<\/strong>,\u201d doing all kinds of things, involving the subject in various possible and impossible situations, sometimes very awkward ones.<\/p>\n

At the moment of entry into analysis the subject is usually experiencing this as a tragic, painful split<\/span><\/strong> between the way she perceives herself, her desires, and so on, and the unpleasant things that keep \u201chappening\u201d to her, and constitute the way things are \u201cin reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the analyst is not \u2014 as is sometimes thought \u2014 the authority that simply refers the subject back to herself, pointing out how she is in fact responsible for what is so systematically \u201chappening\u201d to her; the analyst is,<\/strong> rather and above all, the authority that has to give all this \u201chappening\u201d the time (and the space) to come to the subject<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This could be one of the main reasons for the long duration of analysis, for the precipitation of knowledge does not really solve anything<\/span><\/strong>: we can come to know what there is to know quite soon in this process, yet this insight of knowledge is not enough<\/span><\/strong>; the work of analysis is also needed, the work that is not simply the work of analyzing (things), but much more the work of repetition, work as \u201centropy.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In analysis, the subject very often rushes in different directions, each time expecting to find some salutary knowledge, some secret formula that will deliver her from her pain.<\/p>\n

And as a rule, she comes again and again, through all these different paths, to the same things, and knowledge that keeps repeating itself<\/span><\/strong>. The subject thus often goes along the same paths again and again. Yet this work, in all its entropy<\/span><\/strong>, is precisely not empty, it is not wasted time, it is what is needed for knowledge<\/strong> (that can be present from a very early stage) to come to the place of truth<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

ENTROPY<\/strong>: lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder, a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder <\/span><\/p>\n

[From pg 31 Odd One In]<\/em><\/p>\n

So what, in this respect, is a true comedy? Comedy which does not try to seduce us into deceptive familiarity with the fact that His Highness is also, at the same time, or \u201con the other hand,\u201d as human as the rest of us?<\/p>\n

A true comedy<\/strong> 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In other words: a true comedy about aristocracy has to play its cards in such a way the very universal aspect of this concept produces its own humanity, corporeality, subjectivity<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Here, the body is not an indispensable basis of the soul; an inflexible belief in one\u2019s own<\/span>
\nbaronage is precisely the point where the soul itself is as corporeal as possible<\/span>. The concrete body of the baron, which repeatedly falls into the puddle of human weaknesses, is not simply the empirical body that lies flat in the mud, but much more the belief in his
\nbaronage, his \u201cbaronness.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cbaronness\u201d is the real comic object, produced by comedy as the quintessence of the universal itself.<\/p>\n

To put it in psychoanalytic terms: here, the ego-ideal<\/strong> itself turns out to be the partial (comical) object, and ceases to be something with which we identify via the identification with one of the partial features of its reverse side.<\/p>\n

The ego-ideal directly is a human weakness<\/strong>\u2014which 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.<\/p>\n

The point is not that an aristocrat is also an ordinary man. He is an ordinary man precisely as an aristocrat, at the very peak of his aristocracy.<\/span> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Here we should recall Lacan\u2019s famous remark that a lunatic is not some poor chap who believes that he is a king; a lunatic is a king who believes that he really is a king.<\/strong> Does this not hold even more for comedy?<\/p>\n

It is not some poor chap who believes himself to be a king who is comical (this is rather pathetic), but a king who believes that he really is a king<\/span>.<\/p>\n

A very good recent example of this kind of comic procedure of disidentification is Borat<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Borat<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The constitutive movement of almost every episode of Borat\u2019s apprenticeship in the \u201cUS and A\u201d involves a short circuit between some universal<\/strong> (and acceptable) notion or belief and its obscene other side<\/span><\/strong>. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the latter does not figure as the other side of what is \u201cuniversally acceptable,\u201d but as its most intimate kernel<\/strong> which is made, by Borat, to explode right before our very eyes.<\/p>\n

Take the example of the brief but extremely effective gun shop episode. The firearms possession issue in America is split between, on the one hand, the universally proclaimed right to defend oneself and, on the other, louder and louder reminders of its catastrophic side-effects, such as fatal accidents, misuses of easily acquirable guns.<\/p>\n

Now, what happens in the Borat<\/em> episode is that Borat walks into a (real) gun shop, and asks the guy selling the arms a very straightforward question (in his \u201cKazakhstanian English\u201d): \u201cWhat is the best gun to defend from a Jew?\u201d Without so much as a blink, the shop assistant replies: \u201cI would recommend either a 9 mm or a  45.\u201d<\/p>\n

This exchange is simultaneously both shocking and comical, because of the smoothness with which the rather spectacular short circuit between the \u201cright to self-defense\u201d<\/strong> (by possession of firearms) and the taste for \u201cshooting Jews\u201d<\/strong> passes unnoticed by the assistant. And, of course, the point is precisely that the two cannot in fact<\/em> be dissociated.<\/p>\n

Thus, the difference between subversive and conservative comedies does not lie in their content, in what is subjected to the comical procedure.<\/p>\n

This also means that we will not find it where some authors, following a sort of ascetic ethics, place it: in other words\u2014and to put it simply\u2014in the question of whether we are making fun of ourselves and our own beliefs, or of others and their beliefs. This distinction is invalid for several reasons, but principally for the following one. The direct parody of oneself and one\u2019s beliefs can flourish very well within the conservative paradigm of combining the concrete and the universal<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It can successfully promote the very ideology whose human side and weaknesses are being exposed. There are plenty of examples in several veins of Hollywood comedy, in which derision of our own beliefs and of the \u201cAmerican way of life\u201d produces the very distance necessary to sustain these very same beliefs and this very same way of life.<\/p>\n

Or \u2014 an even more obvious example \u2014 President Bush and his media strategy of mocking his own presidential self, which of course aims precisely at portraying the inflexible war President as \u201cthe guy next door,\u201d as a fallible individual who is aware of his faults and imperfections<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In this case, the wittiness functions precisely as a way of distancing oneself from one\u2019s own concreteness (which, of course, is the very opposite of the primacy of the concrete): one gets evacuated, so to speak, into one\u2019s wit or spirit, and the message sent out is that one is something more<\/em><\/strong>  than one\u2019s miserable concrete self. [Odd One 33]<\/p>\n

The real comedy of George W. Bush<\/strong> can be seen at times when he makes no effort to be funny, but solemnly appears as an American President who believes that he really is an American President. It is at these moments that he comes up with the most comical lines, the collection of which has become an Internet sport.<\/p>\n

Take a few examples: \u201cYou teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test\u201d (Townsend, Tennessee, February 21, 2001). The following, probably the most famous one, is almost as good as the Freud\u2013Heine \u201cfamillionaire\u201d joke: \u201cThey misunderestimated me\u201d (Bentonville, Arkansas, November 6, 2000).<\/p>\n

Or one of the more recent ones: \u201cOur enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are
\nwe. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we\u201d(Washington, DC, August 5, 2004).<\/p>\n

Contrary to this, the other kind of Bush humor, with which he likes to demonstrate his ability to laugh at these miracles of wit that he keeps producing, is already a refashioning of the self-undermining power of \u201cBushisms\u201d themselves into a conservative way of accepting and tolerating pure stupidity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comedy is the moment in which substance, necessity, and essence all lose their  immediate \u2014 and thus abstract \u2014 self-identity or coincidence with themselves.<\/p>\n

This emphasis is important because it reminds us that the end of the mode of representation does not imply a return to immediacy or to an organic fusion of opposites.<\/p>\n

The substance becomes subject in the moment when, through a split in itself, it starts relating to itself. In this way we come not so much to the abolition of representation but, rather, to its new notion, which is in fact very close to the Lacanian concept of representation.<\/p>\n

Could we not say that in comedy, one moment of the substance represents the subject for another moment of the substance? If so,we could perhaps answer an objection that might be raised in relation to the Hegelian distinction between comedy and tragedy, as cited above. We saw that, according to Hegel, the main (formal) problem of tragedy is that it preserves the interval between the subject or the self and the character or stage person that the self is representing.<\/p>\n

With comedy, this interval is supposed to disappear. We might object to this by pointing out that it is precisely in comedy that we find a whole arsenal of various characters that exist quite independently of the concrete subjects, and they are occasionally assumed by these subjects as masks, for the purposes of comedy (\u201cidiotic master,\u201d \u201ccunning servant,\u201d\u201cmiser,\u201d\u201cshrew,\u201d\u201ctramp\u201d. . .). On the other hand, tragedy seems to be much closer to an organic fusion of the actor and his character.<\/p>\n

Most comedies set up a configuration in which one or several characters depart violently from the moderate, balanced rationality and normality of their surroundings, and of other people in it. And, if anything, it is precisely these other, \u201cnormal\u201d people who are \u201conly human\u201d or \u201conly men,\u201d whereas this is far from being the case with comic characters. 49<\/p>\n

There is something very real in comedy\u2019s supposedly unrealistic insistence on the indestructible, on something that persists, keeps reasserting itself and won\u2019t go away, like a tic that goes on even though its \u201cowner\u201d is already dead. In this respect, one could say that the flaws, extravagances, excesses, and so-called human weaknesses of comic characters are precisely what account for their not being \u201conly human.\u201dMore precisely, they show us that what is \u201chuman\u201d exists only in this kind of excess over itself. 49<\/p>\n

\u201cman,\u201d a human being, interests comedy at the very point where the human coincides with the inhuman; where the inhuman \u201cfalls\u201d into the human (into man),<\/p>\n

where the infinite falls into the finite, where the Essence falls into appearance and the Necessary into the contingent. And if it is true that the comic universe \u2014 much more than the tragic universe \u2014 builds within the horizon of immanence, that it abandons the reference to the Beyond and always situates the Essence in a concretely existing situation, it does not do so simply by closing off its finite self in relation to the (infinite) Beyond<\/strong>, by excluding it from its field of reference.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, it does so by including it in the immanence<\/strong>, in the given situation. The Beyond is included in the world and in the human as the heterogeneous element on account of which a man is never simply and only a man.<\/p>\n

the true comic spirit, far from being reducible to this metaphysics of the finite, is, rather, always a \u201cphysics of the infinite.\u201d Moreover, it is precisely this physics of the infinite that
\nsituates comedy on the ground of true materialism, exempts it from all forms of spiritualism, and also gives it its contrareligious thrust\u2014not in any simple sense of static opposition, or of mocking the infinite Other, but, rather, by deploying this infinite Other<\/strong><\/span>
\nas the very material Real of human life as such.<\/p>\n

This is also a point, I believe, where the Hegelian and the Lacanian perspectives meet, although they start from rather different perspectives. For how does the Lacanian perspective differ from the contemporary doxa of human finitude<\/span><\/strong>? Certainly not by nurturing a belief in immortality, nor by maintaining that there is a part or a dimension of men\u2014call it the soul or the subject (as opposed to the individual or the ego) \u2014 which is as such infinite.<\/p>\n

The difference is much more interesting. The predominant contemporary concept of human finitude is, of course, also not simply that of reminding us that sooner or later we will drop dead, and no soul will leave our body to join its heavenly Father.<\/p>\n

It refers \u2014 to put it simply \u2014 to limits and limitations of living human beings. Here finitude is but the emphatic notion, a Master-Signifier of all that human life implies in terms of limitations, incompleteness, division, out-of-jointness, antagonism, exposure to others, \u201ccastration\u201d; of impasses of desire, of two or more ends that never exactly coincide to form a perfect circle.<\/p>\n

It is about a chiasm that fundamentally determines the human condition. It is not also, however, that in this discourse, in the way it uses finitude as its Master-Signifier, the latter appears precisely as the closure of that which is said to resist any closure?<\/p>\n

This is most clearly detectible precisely in the redoubling of a description by prescription, <\/strong>in the passage from \u201cWe are limited, divided, exposed beings\u201d to \u201cBe limited, divided, exposed!\u201d<\/span> (that is to say, you must accept this) \u2014 whereby the latter constitutes the ethical part of contemporary thought concerning human finitude<\/span>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We can see here a kind of reversal of Wittgenstein and his \u201cWhereof one cannot speak, thereon one must remain silent\u201d; it is not a paradoxical prohibition of the impossible but, rather, a paradoxical injunction of the possible, of what there is.<\/p>\n

Despite numerous references, in this ethics, to the possibility of change and of emancipatory politics, this possibility is largely blocked precisely by the imperative of the possible<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In relation to this, the Lacanian stance is not \u2014 as it is sometimes described, or criticized \u2014 that of an imperative of  the impossible, of forcing oneself (or others) beyond the limits of
\nwhat is humanly possible.<\/p>\n

As I have argued elsewhere in more detail, the point of Lacan\u2019s identification of the Real with the impossible is not that the Real is some Thing that cannot possibly happen \u2014 the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens<\/span><\/strong><\/em>. 51<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d. “The ‘Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It.” Lacan The Silent Partners. Edited by Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, New York and London: Verso. 2006. 171-197. The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008 In psychoanalysis the main problem does not lie simply in the subject becoming conscious of her … Continue reading “Zupan\u010di\u010d comedy #2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12767"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14459,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12767\/revisions\/14459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}