Liquidation World by Kukuljevic Alexi;

Author:Kukuljevic, Alexi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: art theory; performance studies; comic laughter; avant-garde; subjectivity; though; nihilism; dandyism; pessimism; money; capitalism; 20th century; twentieth; philosophy; literature; cultural studies; art history; nihilist; modernism; aesthetics
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

As a memorial to absence, the fetish is in relation to the absent (phallus) but not identifiable with it. It marks a minimal difference between the nothing and nothingness, negation and a sign of negation. The substitution indicates that something comes to occupy the very place of the absent, necessitating a distinction between the structural place of the absent and the form of that which occupies that place. Freud refers to the fetish as a compromise between the perception of a lack (castration), the anxiety it produces (the threat of loss), and the necessity of repressing (verdrängen) this anxiety. The fetish institutes a difference between affect and idea, such that the idea of absence remains but the affect (anxiety) attached to it is transformed; the fetish as idea alters the affect (anxiety) associated with the loss. It alters the affect by presenting the absence as attached to something (a foot, a shoe, or any object whatever). Disavowal concerns the displacement of an affect through a presence (the thing—any object whatever) that diverts or perverts the idea. The fetish positions the fetishist in relation to nothingness: a whole that appears through the part’s relation to what it lacks. If the fetishist has always been inseparable from ridicule, it is because the peculiar identity of the fetish, like that of the ridiculed, is symptomatic of a subject that is not one with itself.

If derision aims to make the derided painfully aware of its deficiency, Baudelaire identifies what he calls the absolute comic, associated with the grotesque but above all with pantomime, with a lack of awareness: “one of the most distinctive marks of the absolute comic is that it remains unaware of itself.”28 Absolute comedy is not a matter of ridicule. It does not seek to reduce the one laughed at to nothingness, but produces a form of laughter that positions the subject in relation to the nothing (not nothingness). This would be a form of laughter that situates the object and the subject of laughter in relation to the nothing, making laughter the expression of the not-wholeness of being. This is what I want to indicate with the ridiculous in contradistinction to ridicule.

The mime situates himself beyond ridicule since he does not pretend to be a subject but an object. Yet this lack has nothing to do with the “vegetable joy” of the innocence of a child’s smile, which Baudelaire compares to a cat’s purr or the wag of a dog’s tail. “The comic can only be absolute in relation to fallen humanity.”29 The mime impersonates the parrot’s seriousness, exposing the ridiculous by imitating the lack that removes the parrot from all subjectivity. The mime is the least tragic of figures, since he does not identify with his mask. He repeats, and it is this repetition that is ridiculous. Yet this repetition is not a repetition of anything other than the lack itself. That which is repeated is the nonreflexivity of division; the mime’s lack of affection, its capacity to shield itself from humiliation (the affect of ridicule), derives from impersonation.

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