Title: Black Boy's Comedy: Indestructibility and Anonymity in Autobiographical Self-Making
Abstract: In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan says that comedy, like tragedy, is a relationship between action and desire. While tragedy "functions in the direction of a triumph of death" (Ethics 313) and while its action is toward death, an end game of sorts, comedy, Lacan says, has to do less with a triumph of life over death and more with what he calls the flight of life. In comedy life flies, "slips away, runs off, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, including precisely those that are the most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the signifier" (Ethics 314). So, while in a tragedy the hero submits to desire and to the signifier, dying in the process, in a comedy the action continues despite the encounter with the signifier and despite the disruption this encounter creates. In a comedy, this is to say, the hero is not a character defined by her mortality (as the tragic hero is), but an agent of the endurance of life (a kind of many-in-one), where life is understood as a process of generation, a line of derivation from one individual to another and so on, following life's seemingly inexhaustible chain of transformations.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 8
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