Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy ed. by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler (review)

This 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...