Laughter and the Laughable in the Thought of Jean-Paul Sartre

Abstract

This article investigates the status of laughter and the laughable in Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought, with the aim of situating and clarifying them within the argumentative economy of Sartre’s work. It proceeds from the hypothesis that laughter, in Sartre, constitutes a phenomenon susceptible to phenomenological description, thus distinguishing it from the comic, which we regard primarily as a formal and stylistic structure of the novelistic work. The analysis shows, first, that the explicit thematization of laughter emerges late in L’idiot de la famille yet returns to central problems already formulated in L’être et le néant, especially those related to intentionality, alterity, being-for-others, and the constitution of the psychic. It seeks to demonstrate that laughter must be understood as a passive activity of defense, triggered by the apprehension of a conduct that threatens a determinate historical representation of the “human person,” thereby producing the desolidarization and objectification of the other as a laughable being. Moreover, the article argues that laughter has a serial structure, insofar as it spreads through affective contagion and momentarily constitutes a “society of laughter”. Finally, it is argued that laughter carries a decisive political dimension: by excluding, degrading, and dehumanizing, it can operate as a conservative, normative, and, in certain cases, violent instrument.