When is comedy subversive?
A conversation with philosopher Alenka Zupančič
Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In. On Comedy has been described as the book that consoles us for the reflections on comedy that are missing from Aristotle’s Poetics. Drawing on Hegel, Freud, and Lacan, and on numerous examples from the Western tradition of comedy, from Aristophanes to Borat, Zupančič presents a theory of the comical and its peculiar dialectics of matter and spirits, concrete and universal, (corpo)real and ideal. This conversation will circle around the distinctions between conservative and subversive comedy and between irony and humour, the comical character as an incarnation, and the deconstruction of Bergson’s opposition between life and mechanics.
Interviewer: Lilian Munk Rösing
“The Odd One”: Cover of The Odd One In: On Comedy by Alenka Zupančič, published by the MIT Press in 2008.
About
Alenka Zupančič is a professor at The European Graduate School and the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her most important books are: Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Verso, 2000), The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008), What is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017), Let Them Rot: Antigone's Parallax (Fordham University Press 2023), Disavowal (John Wiley and Sons Ltd 2024).
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