COMEDY

134 LAUGHTERceiling, it started little by little to open. They rose higher andhigher through that opening, their cardboard noses were no longervisible, and now there were only three pairs of shoes passingthrough the gaping hole, but these too finally vanished, while fromon high, the dumbfounded students heard the fading, radiantlaughter of the three archangels.(Kundera, 1996:104)Kundera’s novel, set predominantly in communist Czechoslovakia,deals with personal relationships and asks if anything can remainprivate in an intrusive system. Weighed down by alienation andmisunderstandings, laughter is the sound that accompanies freedom, afantasy of weightlessness and unobstructed movement. This is laughteras an expression of the sublime: joyful, angelic, desperate, exhausted,overwhelmed, substituting for speech when nothing can possibly besaid. This small scene in some ways represents the manner in whichlaughter has been conceived in the variety of arguments groupedtogether under the term poststructuralism in the twentieth century. Thisis not to say that postructuralism has adopted Kundera’s depiction of aradiant laughter that transports one to a paradise far from the reach ofoppressive law, but it has configured laughter as a trope that expresses asense of the beyond, of something outside language and cognition as itis organized in the quotidian. Following a theme established in the workof Friedrich Nietzsche, what Simon Critchley has called ‘the goldenlaughter of tragic affirmation’ (Critchley, 2002:105), poststructuralistlaughter acts like a sonar, reaching out and signalling the limit ofeverything that can be said and understood. This laughter is not anexpression of pleasure, superiority, or release; nor is it nonsense, theworthless opposite of intelligibility. Rather, laughter acts as a powerfulrecognition of the end of understanding in language and the comicrecognition of the subject’s failure to grasp it. Georges Bataille haswritten of laughter as ‘ that place where nothing counts anymore—neither the “object”, nor the “subject’” (quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, 1987:741). Following Bataille closely, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen speaks oflaughter as the end of identity and absolute finitude: ‘it is thepresentation, necessarily pathetic and miniscule, of NOTHING…NOTHING is the impossible, the impossible to present, and thus itspresentation can be nothing other than a comedy, risible and ridiculous’(Borch-Jacobsen, 1987:756). While not entirely unlike Bakhtin’ssoaring laughter of liberation, this formulation of laughter neitherrejuvenates nor serves as a palliative against oppressive seriousness.