COMEDY

136 LAUGHTERdeferred. For Nancy, this absent centre can be reconceived as a laugh.‘The origin is laughing’, he writes, ‘There is a transcendental laugh’:What is a transcendental laugh? It is not the obverse of the sign orvalue accorded to serious matters, which thinking, necessarily,reclaims. It is knowledge of a condition of possibility which givesnothing to know. There is nothing comic about it: it is neithernonsense nor irony. This laugh does not laugh at anything. Itlaughs at nothing, for nothing. It signifies nothing, without everbeing absurd. It laughs at being the peal of its laughter, we mightsay. Which is not to say that it is unserious or that it is painless. Itis beyond all opposition of serious and non-serious, of pain andpleasure. Or rather, it is at the juncture of these oppositions, at thelimit of which they share and which itself is only the limit of eachone of these terms, the limit of their signification.(Nancy, 1992:41)Laughter comes to symbolize the absent origin that has no fullsignificance of its own, but which is constitutive of conceptual attemptsto positively structure systems of meaning. What is noteworthy in thisformulation is the extraction of the comic from its understanding oflaughter. Instead of thinking of laughter as the opposite of gravity andintellectual seriousness, Nancy asks it to represent a fundamentalcontradiction that affronts modes of understanding grounded in reason.As such, laughter is a kind of metaphysical contradiction encountered atthe boundary of reason.The French feminist critic Hélène Cixous offers us a similar image oflaughter as sound of signification at the limits of signification. Herfamous essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, a title that evokes an idea ofmythical female monstrosity and ‘outsidedness’, deals with the acts ofdefinition that constitute the formulation of gender distinctions inlanguage. Cixous calls for a redefinition of gender distinctions through arevolution in signification, a redeployment of language capable ofcountering the domination of language by patriarchy, a language thatcan ‘break up the “truth” with laughter’ (Cixous, 1976:888). The laughof the Medusa is the revolutionary call of the woman outside patriarchaldefinitions; this laughter rejects phallocentric identification, and isforging a new language:Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that womenaren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear