Laughter as dissensus: Kant and the limits of normative theorizing around laughter
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Laughter as dissensus: Kant and the limits of normative theorizing around laughter Patrick T. Giamario University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro 27412, NC, USA. [email protected]
Abstract Political theorists have traditionally grappled with laughter by posing a simple, normative question: ‘What role, if any, should laughter play in the polis?’ However, the outsized presence of laughter in contemporary politics has rendered this question increasingly obsolete. What good does determining laughter’s role in the polis do when the polis itself is to a large extent shaped by laughter? The present essay argues that Kant’s aesthetic investigations of laughter in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View offer a much needed alternative to the normative discourse. Kant theorizes laughter as an intensely dialectical experience — at once an aesthetic judgment and an affect. Laughter in Kant enacts dissensus: it disrupts and transforms sensus communis, or the ways subjects see and hear the world in common that organize and structure a political community. The essay illustrates the advantages of a Kantian conception of the politics of laughter over the normative discourse by examining Dave Chappelle’s controversial 2019 stand-up comedy special Sticks & Stones. It concludes that the dissensus enacted by laughter, while not necessarily democratic, provides a privileged opening for democratic politics. Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00447-9 Keywords: laughter; Kant; aesthetics; affect; democracy; Chappelle
Laughter has been at the center of political life in recent years. From the late-night liberal satire machine to the insult comedy of Donald Trump; from tongue-in-cheek tweets by government agencies to right-wing internet troll farms; from comedians winning elected office to religious militants murdering cartoonists: laughter is a key source, object, and means of political discourse and action in the early twenty-first century. The history of political thought has traditionally grappled with laughter by asking a simple normative question: ‘What role, if any, should laughter play in the polis?’ Plato warns that ‘no writer of comedy … shall be permitted to make fun of any of the citizens’ (Plato, 2016, 935e–936a), while Aristophanes lays comedic waste to Socrates (Aristophanes, 2012); Hobbes advises that ‘great persons … have 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Giamario
not leisure enough to laugh’ (Hobbes, 1994, pp. 454–455), while Nietzsche celebrates the ‘golden laughter’ of free spirits (Nietzsche, 1989, pp. 231–232); and Habermas excludes ‘jokes, fictional representations, irony, games, and so on’ from deliberative democracy (Habermas, 1982, p. 271), while Lyotard insists that ‘politics … is comedy for the people’ (Lyotard, 1988, p. 144). Contemporary political theorists have continued this tradition by identifying certain practices, sources, and styles of laughter as playing
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