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Zusatztext Fans of philosophy and literature alike will truly enjoy Alfie Bown's In the Event of Laughter for the way it draws together Hegel! Freud! Lacan! and Badiou with readings of Chaucer! Shakespeare! Dickens! Gogol! Baudelaire! and Kafka! to tell a compelling story about the meaning of laughter. Bown shows that when we divide laughter into its common types (radical vs. reactionary! canned vs. spontaneous! liberatory vs. enthralling)! we obscure the fact that laughter is! in toto ! our experience in ideology. Every laugh resets our connection to ideology right at the moment ideology itself! intermittent as ever! releases us into laughter. Every guffaw is an event that refashions us for a society constantly remaking itself. Every chortle! a world reimagined but reaffirmed. As Bown nicely demonstrates! laughter as ideology comprehends social and biological! political and natural! and ideal and material domains! all the way up to the angels and all the way down to the turtles. Informationen zum Autor Alfie Bown is author of The Playstation Dreamworld (2017) and Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (2015). He is editor of Everyday Analysis and writes for The Guardian and The Paris Review ! among other publications. Discussing examples from Chaucer to Charlie Hebdo, this book puts forward a new theory of laughter. It argues that we cannot understand the power that laughter has over us until we see it as a strange and unique kind of psychoanalytic ‘event’: an eruption that changes past, present and future without us realizing. Zusammenfassung Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of ‘comedy studies’ that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the ‘history of laughter,’ discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of FiguresPreface and AcknowledgmentsNote on the TextIntroduction: Laughter’s Doubleness1. Laughter as Liberation2. Laughter and Control3. Laughter as Event4. Laughter and AnxietyConclusionBibliographyIndex...
