![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Dramatization and comedy are recurring themes in Deleuze's work in the 1960′s and, from his book on Nietzsche in 1962 through The Logic of Sense in 1969, remarks on humor and comedy are closely bound to ethical and political concerns. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he speaks of the “true” and “false” senses of the tragic in order to frame his interpretation of Nietzsche as a whole, but the distinction acquires its immediate importance from its bearing on the question, “what is justice?” In 1967, in Coldness and Cruelty, he describes legal critique as possible only in terms of irony and comedy. And, in 1969, in The Logic of Sense, the series on humor is followed and explicated by the series “On the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy.” This final discussion makes clear what binds these disparate discussions together: comedy is a mode of dramatization that facilitates a morally relevant experience that does not necessarily or immediately engender an act of judgment. For Deleuze, comedy is a demonstration that provokes an experience of wonder at a world that is not organized by the concepts and judgments of subjectivity.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Agnes Heller, Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005) 5.
2 Ibid. 4–5.
3 Ibid. 5.
4 Ibid.
5 “The image of thought” is Deleuze's term for the form of philosophical thinking that characterizes the dominant tradition of Western philosophical history. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Nietzsche is characterized as creating a new image of thought, opposed to the previous “dogmatic” one (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, rev. ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2006)). In Proust and Signs ([1963], trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000)) Deleuze describes Proust's work as “vying with philosophy” and challenging the neutral image of thought in the latter with a kind of thought that is forced to think by encounters with signs. Difference and Repetition ([1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994)) contains the most extended discussion of the image of thought. There, expanding on his previous discussions, Deleuze organizes the image of thought into eight “postulates.” The question raised here is, then, whether this neutral and dogmatic form of thought, according to this form, accounts to some extent for the lack of philosophical interest in comedy (especially when compared to the philosophical interest in tragedy).
6 The history of the interpretation of the Poetics is quite complicated. My remarks follow the detailed discussions found in Leon Golden's Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis and in Joe Sachs’ “Introduction” to his translation of the Poetics. Golden argues that Bernays is responsible for the view “that the final product and goal of our involvement with tragedy is the therapeutic purgation of pity and fear” (Leon Golden, Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992) 2), while Lessing argues “that katharsis must represent a form of moral purification” (14). Golden points out that the principal supporting text for Bernays is a passage from the Politics that describes the therapeutic purgation of pity and fear as an instrumental (rather than final) goal of music, used to restore equilibrium to listeners in a heightened emotional state. Similarly, he argues that Lessing's argument rests on a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics that corresponds to no text in the Poetics and leaves unexplained how katharsis could “fine tune excess and deficiency of emotional response” (15). It is the Metaphysics that, for Golden, provides the most support for an interpretation of mimesis in the Poetics. Since the Poetics is concerned with mimesis essentially, and since, according to the famous first line of the Metaphysics, all human beings by nature desire to know, the claim that mimesis arose as a natural way for human beings to understand the world, made at 1448 b 4–17 in the Poetics, establishes that the purpose or end of the katharsis that a spectator experiences from a mimetic work of art is the pleasure of intellectual learning and discovery. Similarly, Sachs describes tragic katharsis in the following way:
This is not a refinement of sensibility that makes our feelings subtler and less coarse; it is a direct and solid impact of two forces that any human being can feel. It does not clear pity and fear out of our systems, but leaves them with us in a strange new combination. By no means does it clear anything up. (Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus/Pullins, 2006) 13)
7 Golden justifies this interpretation by showing that, contrary to Bernays’ claim that katharsis can be understood only in medical terms, Plato's Sophist gives an intellectual meaning to the term and could have plausibly served as the source for Aristotle's use of katharsis in the Poetics (Golden 22–24).
8 Sachs stresses that the experience of wonder is a temporary suspension of judgment (16).
9 Golden points out that, in the Poetics,
Aristotle emphasizes that the essential reason for the pleasure we take in all forms of mimesis is that the act of learning is not only the most pleasant to philosophers but to all other human beings as well, even though their share in it is more limited. Thus, the essential pleasure of comic mimesis, like the essential pleasure of tragic mimesis, must lie in the intellectually illuminating process of “learning and inference.” (71)
10 To summarize this movement: in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze interprets the two senses of the tragic as two modalities of responding to the question of justice – of whether the world has meaning or purpose; in Coldness and Cruelty (in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1991)) comedy is a critique of the law conceived as an instrument for restraining and ordering the world; finally, in The Logic of Sense, humor is the attitude of the one who, through a comedic understanding of the world, refrains from judging it (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas; trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990)).
11 Deleuze's most deliberate use of “the concrete” is in a 1990 letter to Jean-Clet Martin, reprinted at the beginning of the latter's Variations: La Philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Payot, 1993). Deleuze writes: “I have then only one thing to say to you: do not forget the concrete, return to it constantly” (8). The concrete designates whatever forces thinking into activity and Deleuze stresses the difference between a thinking that begins from the concrete and one that begins from concepts (the latter almost unavoidably following the dogmatic image of thought).
12 A notable exception to this tendency is, of course, Jacques Derrida, whose essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” clearly shows the influence of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy:
Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 292)
13 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 11.
14 Ibid. 9.
15 Ibid. 3.
16 Ibid. 38.
17 Ibid. 2.
18 Ibid. 12.
19
Here at this moment of supreme danger for the will, art approaches as a saving sorceress with the power to heal. Art alone can re-direct those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live; these representations are the sublime, whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic means, and the comical, whereby disgust at absurdity is discharged by artistic means. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 40)
20 Ibid. 34.
21 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 18.
22 The English translation consistently renders the relatively straightforward French term juste (meaning “just,” in the sense of justice) as “righteous,” often obscuring the plainly ethical and political character of Deleuze's discussion.
23 Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: Le Froid et le cruel (Paris: Minuit, 2007) 71. The English translation of this essay is loosely translated and is misleading in many places. English translations here are my own unless noted otherwise.
24 Ibid. 75.
25 The history that Deleuze sketches is cursory and lacks any detailed justification. However, if the “true” form of the law can only be recovered from beneath the perverted forms that Sade and Masoch have clothed it in then presumably Deleuze is both justified and bound to produce an account of the law that is as idiosyncratic as its sources.
26 Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch 72.
27 Ibid. 77.
28 Ibid. 73.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid. 77. Deleuze's discussion of institutions in “Coldness and Cruelty” extends and develops a discussion that began in his book on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity. There, he argues that the “main idea” of Hume's critique of the social contract is that
the essence of society is not the law but rather the institution. The law, in fact, is a limitation of enterprise and action, and it focuses only on a negative aspect of society. The fault of contractual theories is that they present us with a society whose essence is the law, that is, with a society that has no other objective than to guarantee certain preexisting natural rights and no other origin than the contract. Thus, anything positive is taken away from the social, and instead the social is saddled with negativity, limitation, and alienation. The entire Humean critique of the state of nature, natural rights, and the social contract, amounts to the suggestion that the problem must be reversed [ … ] The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation but rather a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means. (Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 45–46)
31 Présentation de Sacher-Masoch 78.
32 Ibid. 78–79.
33 Deleuze, Logic of Sense xiii.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. Later, in the “Twentieth Series on Stoic Philosophy,” Deleuze will explicitly liken the Stoic sage to a mime: “This is how the Stoic sage not only comprehends and wills the event, but also represents it and, by this, selects it, and that an ethics of the mime necessarily prolongs the logic of sense. Beginning with a pure event, the mime directs and doubles the actualization, measures the mixtures with the aid of an instant without mixture, and prevents them from overflowing” (Logic of Sense 147).
36 Ibid. 146.
37 Ibid. 149.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid. 127.
40 Ibid. 130.
41 Ibid. 131.
42 Hercules Furens, Seneca.
43 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 132–33.
44 Ibid. 143.
45 Laurent De Sutter, Deleuze: La Pratique du droit (Paris: Michalon, 2009) 37.
46 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 135.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid. 136.
50 Ibid. 137.
51 Ibid. 137–38.
52 See especially Book 2, chapter 3 of the Transcendental Dialectic: The Ideal of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998)).
53 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 138.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid. 139.
56 Ibid. 141.
57 Ibid.
58 Pierre-Andre Boutang, “G as in Left/Gauche” in Gilles Deleuze from A to Z (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
59 Some examples: De Sutter; Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, and Patrick Hanafin, eds., Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009); Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010).
60 In his translation of the Poetics, Sachs renders muthos as “story” rather than the more customary “plot.” He justifies his choice by stating:
The word “plot” may suggest a skeletal framework of events onto which a poet can impose an illusion of life, but stories are genuine wholes that already have a life of their own; this is precisely what Aristotle means when he says that the story is like the soul of the tragedy (1450a 38–39). (4)
61 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 149.