The Object of Comedy

Jamila M. H. Mascat is Lecturer in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Hegel in Jena: The Critique of Abstraction (in Italian, 2011) and currently preparing a book on partisanship and political engagement.
Gregor Moder is Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he teaches philosophy of art. He is the author of Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (in Slovene, 2016) and of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017).

What is the object of comedy? What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy subversive, restorative or reparative? What is at stake politically, socially and metaphysically when it comes to comedic performances? This book investigates not only the object of comedy but also its objectives - both its deliberate goals and its unintended side effects.
In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) -regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.

Reflects on comedy's multilayered cultural, social and political character

Section 1 - Comic Philosophy.- Chapter 1. The uncanny and the comic. Freud avec Lubitsch - Mladen Dolar.- Chapter 2. How They Fought - Sandra Laugier.- Chapter 3. Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness. On Comedy and Revolutionary Partisanship - Jamila M. H. Mascat.- Chapter 4. The Aborted Object of Comedy & the Birth of the Subject. Socrates and Aristophanes' Alliance - Rachel Aumiller.- Section 2 - Comic Psychoanalysis.- Chapter 5. The Three Moments of Comedy - Robert Pfaller.- Chapter 6. From Objects of Desire to Objects of Comedy in Chaplin's Modern Times - Alfie Bown.- Chapter 7. Where Does Dirt Come From? - Alenka Zupancic.- Section 3 - Screening Comedy.- Chapter 8. Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of it All - Benjamin Noys.- Chapter 9. Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence and Comedy in Buster Keaton's The General - Lisa Trahair.- Chapter 10. Bad Cops - Todd McGowan.- Section 4 - Performing Comedy.- Chapter 11. Richard Pryor, the Conedian - Alexi Kukuljevic.- Chapter 12. Comedy as Performance - Gregor Moder.- Chapter 13. After Death Comes Humour. On the Poetics of Alexander Vvedensky - Keti Chukhrov.- Chapter 14. Asking for It. An exchange - Cassandra Seltman and Vanessa Place.- Chapter 15. Of Organic Comedies. Interview with Romeo Castellucci - Jamila M.H. Mascat.