Laughter

Most theories of laughter do not begin with laughter but with the laughable object, Variously conceived of as the comic, the humorous, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the ludicrous. In Laughter, Anca Parvulescu proposes a return to the materiality of the burst of laughter itself. In pursuing that materiality, she uncovers an archive of laughter, inviting us to follow its rhythms and listen to its tones.

Historically, laughter especially the passionate outburst-has often been a faux pas. Manuals for conduct, abetted by philosophical treatises and literary and visual texts, warned against it, offering special injunctions to ladies to avoid jollity that was too boisterous. Returning laughter to the history of the passions, Parvulescu anchors it at the point where the history of the grimacing face meets the history of noise. In the civilizing process that leads to laughter's "falling into disrepute," as Nietzsche famously put it, we can see the formless, contorted face in laughter being slowly corrected into a calm, social smile.

How did the twentieth century laugh? Parvulescu points to a gallory of twentieth-century laughers and friends of laughter, arguing that it was through Georges Bataille that the century laughed its most distinct laugh. In Bataille's wake, laughter becomes the passion at the heart of poststructuralizsm. Looking back at the century from this vantage point, Parvulescu revisits four of its most challenging projects: modernism, the philosophical avant-gardes, feminism, and cinema. The result is an overview of the twentieth century as seen through the laughs that burst at some of its most convoluted junctures.

A remarkable tour through the 'archive of laughter'; Anca Parvulescu analyzes a stunning array of texts, concepts, and anecdotes in order to demonstrate the disturbingly nonhuman element of this most human of activities, Parvulescu demonstrates, in her elegant readings and suggestive meditations, that it is not the subject who laughs, but who is laughed. Indeed, her book suggests a revised formulation of the cogito: 'It laughs, therefore I am not'"-Kenneth Reinhard, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Director, Program in Experimental Critical Theory, UCLA

"In her Laughter: Notes on a Passion, Anca Parvulescu offers a unique answer to the great riddle of the drives in psychoanalytic theory. Eros and Thanatos, life drive and death drive, are in some sense shown to have their common ground in that uncanny convulsion of the body that erupts in a burst of laughter. For Parvulescu, the human capacity to "die laughing"ua capacity whose great master was, as the author argues, Georges Barailleturns out to be the key to new possibilities of human freedom and new kinds of community. The elaboration of this discovery gathers together its own remarkable community of laughers from the Bible, ancient, early modern, and modern philosophy, the sciences of the passions, African-American literature, feminist theory, and the history of cinema. I know of no book that so rigorously and delightfully gets us to rake laughter seriously."uEric L. Santner, author of The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty

Anca Porvulescu is Assistant Professor in the English Department and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.