Comedy and Negativity
Abstract
This paper’s point of departure is the idea that the negativity of contemporary philosophy corresponds to the negativity of comedy. After a brief review of the metaphysical hierarchy of being and of poetic genres, three competing contemporary concepts of negativity are proposed and discussed with examples from theory and comedy: torsion, lacuna, and contraction. Torsion refers to any concept of decline that constitutes being and is demonstrated in Althusser’s use of the Epicurean clinamen.
In comedy, torsion refers to comic uses of the fluidity of sexuality. Furthermore, lacuna refers to an ontological gap or hiatus, and can be seen at work in the Lacanian concept of the phallus. Accordingly, the comedy of the lacuna is a comedy of detachable phallic objects. Finally, contraction is a concept from the Deleuzian ontology of the virtual and is exemplified by the elasticity of language.
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