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    Nichols - Laughter as Gesture - JCRT 4.2

    Laughter as Gesture: Hilarity and the Anti-Sublime

    Stephen G. Nichols
    Johns Hopkins University

    But one thing I do know,
    O Zarathustra: Whoever
    would kill most thoroughly, laughs.

    —Nietzsche

    Recently I ran across an article on laughter that said it wanted to examine ‘uses of laughter in the literal sense of the word.’ [1] The author clearly meant that he wanted to discuss the act of laughter, but that’s not what he said; and, however unconscious his choice of terms, ‘the literal sense of laughter’ was over-determined. Sense connotes ‘meaning,’ and it is precisely the meaning of laughter, meaning in laughter, not to mention theories of laughter that thinkers have been trying to pin down since antiquity.

    > The beginning is a feeling of the ‘I’ that, in every possible gesture and especially in each of its own gestures, experiences something false, a deformation of the inside with respect to which all faithful representation seems a curse against the spirit. It is a feeling in which the ‘I,’ looking at itself in the mirror, discerns a pamphlet stuck to it, even incorporated into it, and, looking outside, laments himself, amazed to see in the face of his fellow men the fullness of comical masks… The disjunction between appearance and essence lies at the basis of both the sublime and the comical; the small sign of the corporeal points to the indescribable.[2]

    > On a very basic level the unity of the body provides for the identity that is necessary, but not at all sufficient, for the unity of the self. Nietzsche, quite consistently, holds that the unity of the body, like all unity, is itself not an absolute fact: ‘The evidence of the body reveals a tremendous multiplicity’ (The Will to Power, 518). …And though…the ‘I’ always seems to refer to the same thing, the content to which it refers and the interests for which it speaks do not remain the same. It is constantly in the process of changing. This process may sometimes tend in the direction of greater unity. Such unity, however, which is at best something to be hoped for, certainly cannot be presupposed. Phenomena like akrasia, or weakness of will, and self-deception, not to mention everyday inconsistency, are constantly posing a threat to it.[3]

    > always the gesture of being at a loss in language; it is always a ‘gag’ in the literal sense of the word, which indicates first of all something put in someone’s mouth to keep him from speaking and, then, the actor’s improvisation to make up for an impossibility of speaking. But there is a gesture that felicitously establishes itself in this emptiness of language and without filling it, makes it into humankind’s most proper dwelling. Confusion turns to dance, and ‘gag’ to mystery.[4]

    > In an art theater proper, one rarely sees an actor who can really walk and stand. As a matter of fact, I have seen only one, but what B[eckmann] is able to do, I have not seen before. He is not only able to walk, but he is also able to come walking. To come walking is something very distinctive, and by means of this genius he also improvises the whole scenic setting. He is able not only to portray an itinerant craftsman; he is also able to come walking like one and in such a way that one experiences everything, surveys the smiling hamlet from the dusty highway, hears its quiet noise, sees the footpath that goes down by the village pond when one turns off there by the blacksmith’s’where one sees B[eckmann] walking along with his little bundle on his back, his stick in his hand, untroubled and undaunted. He can come walking onto the stage followed by street urchins whom one does not see.[5]

    * And now they look at me and laugh: and as they laugh, they even hate me. There is ice in their laughter. (19)
    * I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity’through him all things fall. Not by wrath alone does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity. (41)
    * Still is the bottom of my sea. Who would guess that it harbors sportive monsters? Imperturbable is my depth, but it sparkles with swimming riddles and laughters. (116)
    * And yet he has not learned laughter or beauty. Gloomy this hunter returned from the woods of knowledge. (117)
    * Then laughter surrounded me. Alas how the laughter tore my entrails and slit open my heart. And it spoke to me for the last time…And again it laughed, and fled…But I lay on the ground and sweat poured from my hands. (147)
    * And as Zarathustra was speaking thus he laughed at himself in melancholy and bitterness. (154)
    * Laugh, laugh, my bright, wholesome sarcasm. From high mountains cast down your glittering, mocking laughter. (240)

    Notes

    S. 41 (1991), 279-296.

    Stephen G. Nichols, James M. Beall Professor of French and Humanities and Chair, Romance Languages, at Johns Hopkins University, is currently completing a book entitled Gothic and Guillotine: Building History in Restoration France. A longer version of this article will appear in Laughing Matters: On the Anthropology of Laughter to be published in 2004.

    ’ 2003 Stephen G. Nichols. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/04.2/nichols/

    1. Stephen Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Literature,’ Classical Quarterly, N. ↩︎

    2. ‘Der Anfang ist ein Ichgef’hl, das in jeder m’glichen, zumal in jeder eigenen Geb’rde ein Falsches, eine Verunstaltung des Innern erf’hrt, dem also gerade die treueste Darstellung den Geist zu l’stern scheint, und das in den Spiegel schauend ein ihm angeheftetes, ja einverleibtes Pamphlet auf sich gewahr wird, nach au’en blickend in den Gesichtern seiner Mitmenschen die F’lle komischer Masken klagend bestaunt. [Wenig bedurfte er also um die k’rperliche Parodie auf ihn selbst in eine geschriebene umzusetzen: er brauchte nur den Gegensatz seines Wesens verschweigend, das Zerrbildliche der Erscheinung mit verkehrter Mimik zu erf’hlen. Damit gewann er schon beinah die erhabene Geste! Denn erhaben wei’ sich das Ich in jener ersten Parodie, und der Gestaltung des Erhabenen musste die Entwertung der Geb’rde als eines guten Leumunds vorausgehen.] Das Missverh’ltnis der Erscheinung zum Wesen liegt dem Erhabenen wie dem komischen zugrund: das k’rperliche als das geringe Zeichen deutet auf das Unbeschreibliche.‘’ Max Kommerell, Jean Paul, 4th edition (Frankfurt am Mein: Vittorio Klostermann, 1966), p. 48. Quoted by Giogio Agamben, ‘Kommerell, or On Gesture,’ in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 79. ↩︎

    3. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 181-182. ↩︎

    4. Ibid., pp. 78-79. ↩︎

    5. Ibid., p. 163-164. ↩︎

    6. Nietzsche famously evokes the link between cognition and subjectivity in his 1873 essay, ‘On Truth and Lying in the Moral Sense:’ ‘There is nothing in nature so despicable and mean that would not immediately swell up like a balloon from just one little puff of the force of cognition; and just as every bearer of burdens wants to be admired, so the proudest man of all, the philosopher, wants to see, on all sides, the eyes of the universe trained, as though through telescopes, on his thoughts and deeds.’ Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Ed. By Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 141. ↩︎

    7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), I:14, p. 15. ↩︎

    8. Ibid., I:14, p. 14. ↩︎

    9. ‘Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this? Something in voice [Stimme] and gesture [Geb’rde] as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of the weather and the sea and therefore worthy of a similar awe and observation? Something that bore so visibly the signs of total involuntariness [Unfreiwilligkeit] as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic, that seemed to mark the madman as the mask and megaphone of a divinity? Something that awoke in the bearer of a new idea himself reverence for and dread of himself and no longer pangs of conscience and drove him to become the prophet and martyr of his idea?’ Ibid., I:14, p. 14. ↩︎

    10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951, Reprinted, 1974), ‘23, p. 83.’’ Neil Hertz, The End of the Line, Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 40. ↩︎

    11. Critique of Judgement, '26, pp. 90-91. ↩︎

    12. Friedrich Nitezsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for None and All, Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), '8, p. 34. ↩︎

    13. Quoted by Agamben, ‘Kommerell, or On Gesture,’ p. 78. ↩︎

    14. Ibid., p. 78. The embedded quotation is from Kommerell, Jean Paul, p. 42. ↩︎

    15. S’ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 163. ↩︎

    16. Ibid., p. 164. ↩︎

    17. Ibid, p. 164. ↩︎

    18. Ibid., p. 166. ↩︎

    19. Ibid., p. 164. ↩︎

    20. ‘Kommerell, or On Gesture,’ pp. 77-78. ↩︎

    21. Paul Fleming, ‘The Crisis of Art: Max Kommerell and Jean Paul’s Gestures,’ in Gesture and Gag. The Body as Medium, special issue of MLN 115, 3 (April 2000), p. 526. ↩︎

    22. Eric Johnson, ‘The Laughter Circuit,’ Discover, May 2002, p. 25. ↩︎

    23. For a recent discussion of these issues in a popular venue see, Tad Freund, ‘What’s So Funny? A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh?’ The New Yorker, November 11, 2002, 78-93. ↩︎

    24. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for None and All, Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). ↩︎

    25. ‘So learn to laugh away over yourselves. Lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher! And do not forget good laughter. This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: to you my brothers I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh.’ Ibid.; pp. 295-296. ↩︎

    26. 'Ainsi s’exprime l’auteur anonyme d’un papyrus alchimique datant du troisi’me si’cle de notre ‘re, le papyrus de Leyde. L’univers est n’ d’un ‘norme ‘clat de rire. Dieu, l’Unique, quelque soit son nom , est pris ’ on ne sait pourquoi ’ d’une crise de fou rire, comme s’il avait soudain conscience de l’absurdit’ de son existence.’ Georges Minois, Histoire du rire et de la d’rision (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 15. ↩︎

    27. ‘’ Dieu ayant ri, naquirent les sept dieux qui gouvernent le monde… Lorsqu’il eut ‘clat’ de rire, la lumi’re parut […]. Il 'clata de rire pour la seconde fois: tout ‘tait eaux. Au troisi’me ‘clat de rire apparut Herm’s; au quatri’me, la g’n’ration; au cinqui’me, le destin; au sixi’me, le temps.’ Puis, avant le septi’me rire, Dieu prend une grande inspiration; mais il a tellement ri qu’il en pleure, et de ses larmes na’t l’‘me.’ Minois, Histoire…, p. 15. He references Solomon Reinach, ’ Le rire rituel, ’ in Cultes, mythes, religions (Paris: Ernest Leroux 1912), vol. 4, pp. 112-113. ↩︎