Metaphysics of Laughter: Freud, Lacan, Bataille

Abstract

The article analyzes the notion of laughter through the contributions of Freud, Lacan, and Bataille. Laughter triggered by humor, jokes, and the comic appears as a peculiar articulation of language and jouissance, as an effect of the word on the body. If the joke is a signifier expressed as an unconscious formation structured as language, then laughter is jouissance: and jouissance of the body with respect to the real unconscious. The paper pays special attention to the articulation between law and transgression in the joke, as well as to the corresponding question of sense —direction— and non-sense. It also discusses how laughter suggests castration, but a castration that is not unbearable since the encounter with it is given through the body's laughter, which, at the same time, separates the subject from its alienating and destructive self.