Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy
Cambridge University Press, 8/31/2016
EAN 9781107086173, ISBN10: 1107086175
Hardcover, 265 pages, 23.6 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic from a psychoanalytic perspective. Edited by two leading practicing psychoanalysts and with original contributions from Lacanian practitioners and scholars, this cutting-edge volume proposes a paradigm swerve, a Freudian slip on a banana peel. Psychoanalysis has long been associated with tragedy and there is a strong warrant to take up comedy as a more productive model for psychoanalytic practice and critique. Jokes and the comic have not received nearly as much consideration as they deserve given the fundamental role they play in our psychic lives and the way they unite the fields of aesthetics, literature, and psychoanalysis. Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy addresses this lack and opens up the discussion.
Introduction Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler
Part I. The Laughing Cure
1. Sarah's laughter
where babies and humor come from Manya Steinkoler
2. Psychoanalysis as Gai Saber
towards a new episteme of laughter Dany Nobus
3. Laughing about nothing
Democritus and Lacan Patricia Gherovici
4. The surplus jouissance of the joke
from Freud to Lacan Marcel Drach
5. Can you spare a laugh? Lacan, Freud, and Marx on the economy of jokes Jean Michel Rabaté
6. Mother Pumper and the analyst's donuts Jamieson Webster
7. Not in the humor
bulimic dreams Carol Owens
Part II. Comedy on the Couch
8. Psychoanalysis and tragicomedy
Measure for Measure after Zizek's Lacanian dialectics Geoff Boucher
9. Comedy and the agency of the letter in A Midsummer Night's Dream Matthew Sharpe
10. Jane Austen's wit-craft Molly Rothenberg
11. The sexual politics of comedy
Henry James's 'The Chaperon' Sigi Jöttkandt
12. Power in the closet
and its coming out Alenka ZupanÄÂiÄÂ
Part III. He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Last
Epilogue
repetition, repetition, repetition
Richard Prince and the three R's Simon Critchley.