I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.
And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn:
he was the spirit of gravity–through him all things fall.
Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of
gravity!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Henri Bergson described laughter as fundamentally ambiguous. If we laugh at “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”, at something which breaks with the flow of living movement through exaggerated, incongruous or purposeless action, the gesture is both conservative – it calls to order that which is out of place – and radical – it criticises and mocks the mechanical in everyday life.
The laughter of comedy, unlike the emotions engendered by tragedy, rests upon and demands emotional detachment from the object of humour (one does not laugh at one’s love or friend falling). And while tragedy speaks to us of individuals, comedy concerns itself with general types, with kinds of behaviours and characters that are satirised, parodied, derided, in sum, laughed at. (Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic)
To call attention to the dissonant and to decry the suppression of the dissident at the same time is laughter’s contradiction, but also its irresponsibility, its disorder, its anarchy. Comedy lives on the threshold of this divide between order and chaos. It is, if considered in all seriousness, that which reveals the divide that fractures human existence and all that we create.
It is the same divide that animated Socrates’ philosophical irony. Indeed, we may go so far as to say that without laughter, there is no thought.
It is the same divide that is filled ethically and politically by self-creation; a divide ignored at the price of moralism and violent sovereignty.
…
Is it wrong to laugh at the news of someone’s death, a comedian’s death? If so, then we plead mea culpa. But it was impossible to do otherwise upon learning of the news of the writer Jean-Claude Carrière’s death (February 8), on remembering all of the occasions in which we laughed at and with the humour with which he animated so many films.
His writing gave life to work by Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tati, Pierre Étaix, Volker Schlöndorff, Louis Malle, Milos Forman, Jacques Deray, Peter Brook and so, so many others. Yet even in the most tragic of tales – and Buñuel’s films in this case were by no means comedies -, laughter was not far to be had.
In celebration of Jean-Claude Carrière’s art and his disobedient humour, some few words and a few images to which he gave so much.
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Remembering a rebel: Peter Kropotkin
Educated men — “civilized,” as Fourier used to say with disdain — tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or jailers. But, frankly, do you need them as much as you have been told in musty books? Books written, be it noted, by scientists who generally know well what has been written before them, but, for the most part, absolutely ignore the people and their everyday life. If we can wander, without fear, not only in the streets of Paris, which bristle with police, but especially in rustic walks where you rarely meet passers by, is it to the police that we owe this security? Or rather to the absence of people who care to rob or murder us? I am evidently not speaking of the one who carries millions about him. That one — a recent trial tells us — is soon robbed, by preference in places where there are as many policemen as lamp posts. No, I speak of the man who fears for his life and not for his purse filled with ill-gotten sovereigns. Are his fears real? Besides, has not experience demonstrated quite recently that Jack the Ripper performed his exploits under the eye of the London police-a most active force-and that he only left off killing when the population of Whitechapel itself began to give chase to him? And in our everyday relations with our fellow citizens, do you think that it is really judges, jailers, and police that hinder anti-social acts from multiplying? The judge, ever ferocious, because he is a maniac of law, the accuser, the informer, the police spy, all those interlopers that live from hand to mouth around the Law Courts, do they not scatter demoralization far and wide into society? Read the trials, glance behind the scenes, push your analysis further than the exterior facade of law courts, and you will come out sickened. Have not prisons — which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe — always been universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity? And so on. When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!
Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its philosophy and ideal (1898)
On the centenary of Peter Kropotkin’s death (February 8), we share two texts by Ruth Kinna, the first published online by Freedom News and the second, an abridged version of Ruth Kinna’s foreword to Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution” (PM Press, 2021) published online by Roarmag, along with a selection from Kropotkin’s essay, “Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal” (Anarchist Library).
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