Presentation: Philosophy in the Public Sphere
Drawing on work by Bergson, Baudelaire, and Freud, amongst others, this article develops a rhetorical account of laughter and comedy. The comic is always the result of a dynamic of identity and difference: what makes us laugh is an identity unaware of its own difference, a structure illustrated in t...
Gardado en:
| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Français |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| Acceso en liña: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | Drawing on work by Bergson, Baudelaire, and Freud, amongst others, this article develops a rhetorical account of laughter and comedy. The comic is always the result of a dynamic of identity and difference: what makes us laugh is an identity unaware of its own difference, a structure illustrated in the ridiculous figure of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Laughter is a means of assuring distance between the object and the spectator, the result of an identity that is taken literally but which should be interpreted figuratively. If laughter sets the comical person at one remove from the individual who takes pleasure in laughing, the genre of comedy is a means of bringing resolution and thus of closing the distance opened up by the comic. Problematology shows us that aesthetic pleasure always involves questions, or problems, that we treat as though they were already resolved, through the rhetorical displacement of theatrical performance. |
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