COMEDY

LAUGHTER 135This is not laughter as a release from oppression, but laughter thatencounters the limits of all conceptual formulae and returns toacknowledge the finitude of its own existence. Critchley offers thisuseful explanation,Laughter is an acknowledgement of finitude, precisely not amanic affirmation of finitude in the solitary, neurotic laughter ofthe mountain tops (all too present in imitators of Nietzsche,although administered with liberal doses of irony by Nietzschehimself), but as an affirmation that finitude cannot be affirmedbecause it cannot be grasped…. Laughter returns us to that limitedcondition of our finitude, the shabby and degenerating state of ourupper and lower bodily strata, and it is here that the comic allowsthe windows to fly open onto our tragic condition.(Critchley, 1997:159)What appears to be the intangible, impermanent, extra-linguisticnature of laughter has appealed to some writers on deconstruction. Theself-reflexive structure of deconstructive readings, their interest in‘play’, effective repetitions, aporia (the expression of doubt), andlinguistic and etymological puns have been understood as an innovativeand necessary incorporation of a type of laughter in work that engageswith the foundational discourses of philosophy, discourses from whichlaughter has previously been excluded. Jean-Luc Nancy sees the utilityof a concept of laughter to deconstruction: ‘Laughter is neither apresence nor an absence, it is the giving of a presence in its owndisappearance. Not given, but giving, and thus suspended on the edge ofits own presentation…laughter is the giving of an infinite variety ofpossible faces and meanings. It is, in a word, the repetition of this offer’(Nancy, 1987:729). Understood this way, laughter is a form of theDerridean concept of différance, a way of thinking of language as astructure of infinite referral and deferral, in which there are no fullymeaningful terms, only traces of terms. In a piece that specificallyfocuses on the work of French philosopher of language Jacques Derrida(1930–), Nancy continues the thematization of laughter as a trope thatcan be used to interrogate the problem of the absent or deferredpresence of full meaning that is a key theme in deconstructive work.Deconstruction argues that the centre or core of meaning, the plentiful‘originary’ truth that validates all thought and understanding, whether itbe envisaged as a theological or philosophical concept, can never berevealed through language but only ever be alluded to and infinitely