Abstract
This chapter addresses the paradox of laughter and communication, posing the question: if laughter is radically unstable, how can it relate to language? Laughter clearly is a mode of communication; its textual representation is quite consistent across languages; and yet it cannot be reproduced or paraphrased. Using especially Adriana Cavarero and Helene Cixous, I show that the laughter of delight, though it has meaning, is irreducibly itself, unique and uncapturable. It is epistemologically inappropriate, and cannot be contained in conventional modes of interpretation: the moment of laughter can only be expressed as itself.
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Notes
Neatly attested in one of the Greek magical papyri, in which God laughs the world into being: P. Leiden J395, tr. Betz, H. D. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
Tanks to Radcliffe Edmonds for first telling me of this papyrus; it is briefly discussed in Halliwell, S. Greek Laughter: A Study in Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12–13.
See Cavarero, A. For More than One Voice. Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression tr. P. A. Kottman (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005; first published in Italian, 2003).
Warnings against being “metaphysically seduced”: Pin-Fat, V. Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical Reading (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 5 and passim, drawing on Wittgenstein. See also Braidotti’s introduction to In Spite of Plato: “what Cavarero wishes to stress is that the living being…precedes the inscription into the symbolic and thus is prior to its specific order” (xvii).
Notwithstanding the deflationary note of O’Donnell in his commentary ad loc.: “Modern medicine ascribes the apparent smile of a sleeping newborn to fatulence”; contrast Sroufe, L. A. and E. Waters, “The Ontogenesis of Smiling and Laughter: A Perspective on the Organization of Development in Infancy”, Psychological Review 83 (1976), 173–89.
Kristeva, J. “Stabat Mater” in eadem, Histoires d’amour (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1983), 241–2. Kristeva also seems to be gesturing towards laughter’s unrepresentability near the beginning of “Stabat Mater,” when she writes, “Writing [words] down is an ordeal of discourse, like love. What is loving, for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible” (226).
See also Parvalescu: “It is as if from now on Abraham and Sarah laugh a little when they say their own names,” Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 17.
Note Snediker, M. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 10 for a different way of re-thinking the subject-object relation around the “durability” of the object — “its own capacity for loving in spite of feeling damaged, or even repelled, by the subject” — again conflating language and bodies.
“Lacan does provide some crucial elements for a description and explanation of the psychic components of women’s oppression, although he himself does not acknowledge the structure of patriarchal oppression”: Grosz, E. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), 145. This book offers a clear discussion of Lacan’s views, followed by an exposition and critique of feminist responses to him, especially those of Kristeva and Irigaray.
For a convenient excerpt, Kristeva, J. “The Semiotic and the Symbolic,” in The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook ed. C. Roman, S. Juhasz, and C. Miller (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 45–55;
more extensively, Kristeva, J. Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; first published in French, 1974).
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© 2013 Catherine Conybeare
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Conybeare, C. (2013). “Empty Speech”: Laughter and Language. In: The Laughter of Sarah: Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370914_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370914_7
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