The Legacy of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Laughter

Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset

Lydia Amir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429000867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book investigates the role of humor in the good life, specifically as discussed by three prominent French intellectuals who were influenced by Nietzsche's thought: Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Clément Rosset. Lydia Amir begins by discussing Nietzsche's reception in France, and she explains why and how he came to be considered a "philosopher of laughter" in the French academe. Each of the subsequent three chapters focuses on the significance of humor and laughter in the good life as advocated by Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset. These chapters also explore the complex relationship between the comic and the tragic, and of humor and laughter to irony, satire, and ridicule. The Legacy of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Laughter makes an invaluable contribution to recent interpretive work done on Bataille and Deleuze, and offers further introduction to the relatively understudied Rosset. It illuminates the philosophies of these three thinkers, their connection to Nietzsche, and, overall, the significant role that humor plays in philosophy.

1 Georges Bataille—The Laughter of Ecstasy

DOI: 10.4324/9780429506116-3

Finding… in the given of laughter, the central given, the primary given, and perhaps even the given behind philosophy…Insofar as I am doing philosophical work, my philosophy is a philosophy of laughter.

(Georges Bataille, “Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears,” 2001, 138)

The laughter of ecstasy doesn’t laugh.

(Georges Bataille, Guilty, 103)

Georges Bataille (1897–1962), “one of the most important authors of his generation,” according to Michel Foucault,¹ has been relatively ignored during his lifetime. He was scorned as an advocate of mysticism by Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.² The young philosophers Bataille collaborated with did not share his radical irrationalism;³ only the advent of poststructuralism in the 1960s sparkled a philosophical interest in his thought.⁴ Bataille enjoyed a considerable posthumous influence on dominant French authors, such as Foucault, Philippe Sollers and Jacques Derrida.⁵ His impact is felt also in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard as well as in the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan.⁶ As Carolyn Bailey Gill noted a few years ago, Bataille is part of “a number of French writers and thinkers whose potential influence and importance, only detected in their own lifetime by a small circle of readers, is now slowly being revealed to the English-speaking world.”⁷ Today, Bataille’s modernity is emphasized in contemporary French philosophy and the interest in his thought in the English-speaking world is steadily growing.⁸

The philosophical merits of Bataille’s thought may be disputed; however, a study of the French legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of laughter can only begin with Bataille. First, because of Bataille’s pioneering interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosopher of laughter and the influence this interpretation had in France. Second, because Bataille’s thought assigns to laughter a significance that is unprecedented in both the philosophy and history of laughter: for Bataille, solving laughter’s mystery would resolve everything. Third, because Bataille entrusts laughter with a unique role as the key to the good life: laughter is the very tool of the highest human operation, sovereignty, which consists in simultaneously annihilating and preserving oneself; as there is nothing beyond the sovereign self, the laughter that enacts it becomes divine; and the experience of laughter for Bataille, the former Catholic, replaces Christianity without residue.

Bataille’s view of laughter as an experience of the divine, which lies at the heart of his philosophical project of suppressing oneself while conserving oneself, accounts for the interest we may find in his thought. However, Bataille’s significance lies in the primordial role he fulfills in the reception of Nietzsche as a philosopher of laughter—an interpretation that would ultimately change the face of philosophy.⁹ As the two aspects of his thought cannot be differentiated, Bataille’s relevance for a study of laughter cannot be disputed nor should an account of his philosophy ignore his view of laughter. Allow me to explain how these two aspects of his work relate to each other.

Bataille is explicit about being a philosopher of laughter in his own right; indeed, he claims that in as much as he is doing philosophical work, his philosophy is a “philosophy of laughter”; laughter is the puzzle which “at all costs” he “would solve (which, solved, would of itself solve everything),” because it “is the central given, the first given, and perhaps even the given behind philosophy”; and, following his extraordinary experiences with laughter, in which “illuminated convulsively” he discovered that “laughter was revelation, opened up the depth of things,” Bataille declares laughter’s divinity while confessing to his fear of being “LAUGHTER ITSELF!”¹⁰

Bataille is also a willful interpreter of Nietzsche, who initiated and profoundly impacted, partly directly, partly through Pierre Klossowski, the French reception of Nietzsche as a philosopher of laughter, parody, chance and play.¹¹ Bataille the philosopher and the interpreter can hardly be differentiated. While Bataille’s view of the world as thoroughly parodic, which he introduces at the beginning of L’Anus solaire (1927) could be influenced by Nietzsche, Bataille’s engagement with laughter antedates his reading of Nietzsche, and most certainly his writing on him.¹² However, at least according to Bataille’s testimony, it is erroneous to consider him a commentator of Nietzsche; he claims, “I am the only one to present myself, not as an interpreter of Nietzsche, but as being the same as he.” He explains the intimate bond his thought shares with Nietzsche’s as follows: “Not that my thought is always loyal to his: it is often removed from it, especially when I envisage the meticulous developments of a theory. But this thought places itself within the conditions where Nietzsche’s thought placed itself.”¹³

Bataille reads Nietzsche as a mystic, whose practice we should follow if we wish to understand his thought. It is through Bataille’s repetition or parody of Nietzsche that the latter was perceived as a philosopher of laughter. As Douglas Smith notes, moreover, “Bataille’s interpretation of Nietzsche may seem willful sometimes, as he assimilates Nietzsche to his own preoccupations…but he thereby illuminates aspects of Nietzsche’s thought obscured or neglected by other interpretations.”¹⁴

Prior to his engagement with Nietzsche, Bataille had remarkable experiences with laughter, some of them when very young. They are significant insofar as Bataille makes these experiences the touchstone of his philosophy by describing it as “a philosophy founded on the experience of laughter,” which “does not even claim to go further.” Indeed, “it is a philosophy that doesn’t concern itself with problems other than those that have been given to me in this precise experience” (US 138). Bataille gives us precise accounts of these experiences:

Late in night…a space constellated with laughter opened its dark abyss before me…I became in this “Nothingness” unknown—suddenly…I negated these gray walls which enclosed me, I rushed into a sort of rapture. I laughed divinely…I laughed as perhaps one had never laughed; the extreme depth of each thing opened itself up—laid bare, as if I were dead…I was illuminated convulsively.

(IE 34)

Reflecting on this experience, he explains:

At first I had laughed, upon emerging from a long Christian piety, my life having dissolved, with a spring-like bad faith, in laughter. Of this laughter, I have already described the point of ecstasy but, from the first day onward, I no longer had any doubt: laughter was revelation, opened up the depth of things.

This experience antedates his meeting with Henri Bergson; yet it was the lecture of Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic ([1911]1999) and a disappointing encounter with the philosopher that prompted Bataille’s interest in laughter:

I was in London (in 1920) and I was to have dinner with Bergson…I had this curiosity—while at the British Mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Prologue: The French Reception of Nietzsche as a Philosopher of Laughter
• 1 Georges Bataille—The Laughter of Ecstasy
• 2 Deleuze—The Humor of Affirmation
• 3 Rosset—The Laughter of Annihilation
• Concluding Remarks: Additional Twentieth-Century French Views of Laughter
• Index