The Object of Comedy

What is the object of comedy? What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy subversive, restorative or reparative? What is at stake politically, socially and metaphysically when it comes to comedic performances? This book investigates not only the object of comedy but also its objectives - both its deliberate goals and its unintended side effects. In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) -regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.

Auteur
Jamila M. H. Mascat is Lecturer in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Hegel in Jena: The Critique of Abstraction (in Italian, 2011) and currently preparing a book on partisanship and political engagement.
Gregor Moder is Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he teaches philosophy of art. He is the author of Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (in Slovene, 2016) and of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017).

Contenu
A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction to the Object of Comedy Jamila M. H. Mascat and Gregor ModerSection 1 Comic PhilosophyChapter 1. The uncanny and the comic. Freud avec Lubitsch Mladen DolarChapter 2. How They Fought Sandra LaugierChapter 3. Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness. On Comedy and Revolutionary Partisanship Jamila M. H. MascatChapter 4. The Aborted Object of Comedy & the Birth of the Subject. Socrates and Aristophanes' Alliance Rachel Aumiller
Section 2 Comic PsychoanalysisChapter 5. The Three Moments of Comedy Robert PfallerChapter 6. From Objects of Desire to Objects of Comedy in Chaplin's Modern Times Alfie BownChapter 7. Where Does Dirt Come From? Alenka Zupani
Section 3 Screening ComedyChapter 8. Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of it All Benjamin NoysChapter 9. Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence and Comedy in Buster Keaton's The General Lisa TrahairChapter 10. Bad Cops Todd McGowan
Section 4 Performing ComedyChapter 11. Richard Pryor, the Conedian Alexi KukuljevicChapter 12. Comedy as Performance Gregor ModerChapter 13. After Death Comes Humour. On the Poetics of Alexander Vvedensky Keti ChukhrovChapter 14. Asking for It. An exchange Cassandra Seltman and Vanessa Place Chapter 15. Of Organic Comedies. Interview with Romeo Castellucci Jamila M.H. Mascat
Notes on ContributorsAbstractsIndex