Derision, Or the Negating Laughter

One of the many moments in which one has no choice but to agree with Žižek is when he says that he is most depressed when seeing stupid people happy¹—is Žižek merely complaining from within the master–slave dialectic, as though this were only a matter of virtue and rank having fallen out of proportion? But just as knowledge and truth, in Nietzsche and Freud among others, come apart from one another, laughter and happiness also come apart, so that we have to refer to section 333 of The Gay Science, namely Nietzsche’s mockery of Spinoza. We all know that Spinoza, in the preface to Part III of the Ethics, De Origine et Natura Affectuum, most eagerly vindicates human affects: philosophers before him had attacked and derided the passions, attributing them to some defect of human nature:

…naturae humanae vitio tribuunt quam propterea flent, rident, contemnunt…

…they attribute it to a fault of human nature, and therefore weep over it, laugh at it, and despise it…

Spinoza elsewhere gives this slogan:

Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!

Do not laugh, do not lament, do not detest, but understand.

Yet, since Spinoza himself had already adopted the so-called geometrical method—the method of the body, if one may put it so; see the definition of affectus:

…corporis affectiones quibus ipsius corporis agendi potentia augetur vel minuitur, juvatur vel coercetur, et simul harum affectionum ideas…

…the body’s affections by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time the ideas of these affections…

If one is to vindicate the affects, must one not understand them from their action upon the body?² Nietzsche, then, in fact pushes Spinoza’s method further: beneath, or before, understanding (or consciousness), there remain the instinctive affects of the will to power—mocking, lamenting, detesting—and these affects too can only be grasped by the methods of mocking, lamenting, detesting….

And Freud, in the separately published Die Verneinung* negation, discusses negation or denial—more precisely Verneinungnegation, while Abweisungrejection in the essay names the rejection of an association—even if Freud is, to some degree, arguing by force: the patient’s denial of the signification borne by an image in a dream is precisely the unconscious speaking by means of denial, while the patient himself remains ignorant of it, so that one must:

…bei der Deutung von der Verneinung abzusehen und den reinen Inhalt des Einfalls herauszugreifen…

…in interpretation, set the negation aside and seize the pure content of the association…

This is just the argument mentioned in The Life of Brian: the true Messiah is so humble that he denies being the Messiah; therefore the more he denies being the Messiah, the more he becomes the Messiah.³ Freud’s view may thus be summarized by saying that denial itself stands in:

…eine Aufhebung der Verdrängung, aber freilich keine Annahme des Verdrängten…

…a lifting or cancellation of repression, but of course not an acceptance of the repressed…

In other words, the negation of the repressed stands between complete repression and complete affirmation, and becomes identifiable in just this way.⁴ Of course, we all know that Lacan later treats negation from the standpoint of a linguistic structure of double negation, that is, that there exists a rejection of a primordial negation, i.e., Verwerfung or forclusion; the rejection of the prohibition makes it fundamentally impossible for the Oedipal subject to be formed, and therefore impossible for there to be repression and a negation of repression, because in forclusion what is rejected is shut entirely outside the subject, as the French -clusion suggests.⁵ Therefore, for Lacan, denial/negation is not only already founded upon some kind of Bejahungaffirmation, but the subject’s desire also manifests itself especially in negation. The French structure of double negation—where in the subjunctive one sometimes has to insert an expletive ne, as in Je crains qu’il ne vienne (“I fear that he will come,” not “I fear that he will not come”)—has its ne in the subordinate clause in fact coming from the desire of the subject of enunciation (sujet d’énonciation) rather than from the grammatical subject; it may thus be expressed as: “I do not desire that he come, and therefore I fear that he will come.”⁶ In certain other Indo-European languages there are likewise analogous expletive negatives or non-declarative negations, for instance the distinction between Latin ne and non, or between ancient Greek μή and οὐ: in the sentence ἀλλὰ μὴ οὐχ οὕτως ἔχῃ (“but lest it not be so,” or more idiomatically, “but perhaps it is not so”), the former may be said to come from the subject of enunciation, while the latter comes from the grammatical subject; or take Old Norse engi/enginn: þessir dvergar kunnu betr smíða af járni en engi aðrir—these dwarfs could forge iron better than any others. Here the “no one,” naturally, is a kind of evaluation by the narrating subject, namely that “no one” could forge better.⁷ Can we therefore say that those daughter languages with expletive negatives have always exceeded the Proto-Indo-European strategy of marking negation by nasal sounds (n–m), and have produced instead a whole rich series of negative words—as in the French negatives of varying degrees: jamais, plus, point, rien…, all of which were not originally negative? At this point one should probably say only this: that these languages, while inheriting ancient negative particles, also continually grammaticalized what were not originally negatives—minimal-quantity words, temporal adverbs, comparative items, or indefinite pronouns—into new negative markers; this should not be described as “always exceeding,” but rather as the historical tendency of negation to attach new bodies, desires, and pragmatic intensities to itself.⁸

And within all this, needless to say, laughter is Nietzsche’s most beloved activity. One need only look at the final part of the third book of Zarathustra—in a certain sense once capable of standing as the ending of the whole book—“Die sieben Siegel,” where Lachen is repeatedly invoked:

…im Lachen nämlich ist alles Böse bei einander, aber heilig- und losgesprochen durch seine eigne Seligkeit…

…for in laughter all evil gathers together, but is sanctified and absolved by its own bliss…

Nietzsche likewise evaluates a philosopher by the importance of laughter for that philosopher; Skinner, for his part, once defended Hobbes, whom Nietzsche criticizes as the stiff-upper-lip, mock-puritan Englishman who never laughs, in “Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter.”⁹ This laughter is without doubt mocking laughter: the böse appearing in the sentence im Lachen is extremely thorny in Nietzsche, but mockery is nevertheless the proper attitude of Nietzsche’s noble toward Nietzsche’s slave, for to the noble there is not the moral opposition between Gut and Böse, but only the opposition of capacity between Gut and Schlecht.¹⁰

All these forms of mockery make us think of Bergson. Had Bergson really never read Nietzsche? In the first chapter of his little essay Le rire, Bergson gives his definition of “the comic” as the moment in which “the living body suddenly becomes mechanical”:

D’où venait ici le comique ? De ce que le corps vivant se raidissait en machine

Where did the comic come from here? From the living body stiffening into a machine.

To explain it in the terms of Bergson’s own philosophy is of course to say that the living flow of life is interrupted by some mechanism, so that the body whose life has been suspended appears clumsy and ridiculous.¹¹ Although Bergson somewhat looks down upon the body—the comic is always bodily, so that the body itself is also always comic!—his binding of the comic to life is indeed also the procedure of Nietzsche’s philosophy: at that which is dying, one may very well laugh aloud. In the end, laughter should not be neutral; it always bears within it the other two instincts Nietzsche gathers together, namely lament and detestation; further still, this has to do with power and with the social norms produced by power. The reason seeing stupid people happy is depressing, then, is that fortune has gone badly, so badly that the stupid lump has seized power. Without needing to mention Foucault, this point has already received its best development especially in Bakhtin after Bergson, namely in Rabelais: marketplace gestures and speech as a pure and unconscious expression of vitality in ritual/theatrical form:¹² Обрядово-зрелищные формы (празднества карнавального типа, различные площадные смеховые действа …) and …жанры фамильярно-площадной речи…

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Footnotes

1. Slavoj Žižek, “Q&A,” The Guardian, August 9, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/09/slavoj.zizek. ↩

2. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, pt. III, pref. and def. 3, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Spinoza, Political Treatise, chap. 1, sec. 4, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §333. ↩

3. Sigmund Freud, “Negation” (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 235–39; Freud, “Die Verneinung,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 (London: Imago, 1948), 11–15; Graham Chapman et al., Monty Python’s Life of Brian, directed by Terry Jones (United Kingdom: Cinema International Corporation, 1979). ↩

4. Freud, “Negation,” 236. ↩

5. Jacques Lacan, “Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung,’” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 318–33. ↩

6. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 67–68; Michel Arrivé, “Ce que Lacan retient de Damourette et Pichon: l’exemple de la négation,” Langue française 30, no. 124 (1996): 112–23. ↩

7. Plato, Cratylus 436b, in Plato: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. H. N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 167 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926); Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, rev. Gordon M. Messing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), §§2690–2768; Geir T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), s.v. “engi.” ↩

8. Otto Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages (Copenhagen: A. F. Høst, 1917); Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti, eds., The Diachrony of Negation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014); Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 137–39. ↩

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die sieben Siegel,” in Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. III; Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §294; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 142–76. ↩

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay, §§10–11, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ↩

11. Henri Bergson, Le rire: essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1900), chap. 1; Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911). ↩

12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 4–7; M. M. Bakhtin, Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965). Meaning: “…ritual-spectacular forms (carnival-type festivities, various marketplace comic performances …)” and “…genres of familiar marketplace speech…” ↩