The Offices Of Comedy

Abstract

THE OFFICES OF COMEDY Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2008, 230pp; £14.95 paperback Slavoj Zizek is effusive in his praise of this book and it is easy to see why. The Odd One In is a brilliant contribution to the theorising of comedy. Introducing her earlier book, Ethics of the Real, Zizek admitted that he was 'agape with envy and fury, feeling threatened in the very core of my philosopher's existence, awestruck by the sheer beauty and vigour of what I had just read'.1 He has even more cause to be threatened here. Like Mladen Dolar, the third principal member of the Slovenian Lacanian school, Alenka Zupancic lives in the shadow of Zizek's bravura performances and theoretical fireworks but in many respects she is his equal - her exposition of Lacan in Why psychoanalysis? is as profound as any of his - while in others she surpasses him - most notably in her superior understanding and consequently more just estimate of Deleuze. In the tradition of Jacques-Alain Miller - to whom the Slovenian Lacanians are so deeply indebted - her starting point is the lack in the Other: put at its simplest, the lack of the signifier which would enable self-completion. Frequently this notion is translated into, and thereby reduced to, the classic themes of existentialist philosophy: the human subject alienated from society and separated from something oflife. Zupancic's thinking on what she terms 'the subject's unrepresented presence in the Real' (pi 67) is much more sophisticated. The lack is a gap which at one and the same time 'separates the subject from and links her to her enjoyment and/or symbolic function' (p20 1 ). In other words, there is always a gap between the subject and the signifier on which its existence depends: the gap inhabited by the notorious object a. Following the Lacan ?? Seminar XVII, Zupancic conceives this object as at once lack - insofar as the object a is the eternally missing object of desire - and excess: the subject, in its failure to attain the lost object, produces a surplus jouissance whose satisfactions disregard the subject's conscious wishes. On this basis Zupancic makes short work of the doxa that comedy reconciles us to our finitude. Man's finititele, she writes, is 'corroded' by 'desire in its radical negativity' (p52) and the drive with its generation of surplus jouissance. Consequently, '[not] are we not infinite, we are not even finite' (p53). And this is the source of comedy for, as Zupancic argues, 'If humans were only human(s)... there would be no comedy' (p49). This contradiction within finitude and its manifestation in a surplus jouissance - the plus-de-jouir - is apparent in a number of comic modes. For example, she discerns the plus-de-jouir operating in characters like Moliere's miser, Harpagon, whose mode of enjoyment is at odds with his ego. In such characters, she argues, the id obtains satisfactions whatever the stresses and misery experienced by the ego. Similarly she detects in the comedy situations which develop around a character and his double, the split between the subject and the signifier, and between the subject and its self-image. In such comedies, she claims, the redoubling, by introducing a surplus object, not ruptures the subject's imaginary unity but creates a short circuit between the heterogeneous elements within subjectivity which can neither unite nor separate. Thirdly in comedies of mistaken identities she argues that the comedy again arises from a troublesome surplus. As she astutely observes, whereas in thrillers the suspense arises from an impending cataclysm - the question is whether the hero will escape in time - in comedies the catastrophe has already occurred and the suspense arises from the question of how they will manage its effects, in particular the surplus object. Hence, in the prototype of this form of comic suspense, the question is not whether the husband will discover the proverbial lover in his wife's closet but rather 'what will happen after he does' (pp92-3). …