Laughing at castration : bataille's laughter in lacan's "return to freud"

Abstract

At the end of his theoretical and clinical journey, Sigmund Freud concluded that, despite all the efforts of analytical treatment, the analysand's castration anxiety appears as an insurmountable limit to which the analysand and the psychoanalyst must resign themselves. By delimiting castration anxiety as the insurmountable limit of human existence, Freudian psychoanalysis is operating with a sad and serious concept of anxiety. In his famous “return to Freud”, Jacques Lacan places psychoanalysis in the tradition of François Rabelais, who recognized the therapeutic potential of laughter in the face of the melancholic seriousness of the human being. In addition, Lacan also proposes during his teaching a concept of a lacerating anxiety which, because it is not reduced to the symbolic register of expectations regarding the desire of the Other, is thought of within the register of the real. This lacerating anxiety is triggered by a double lack that occurs at the moment when the lack inherent in the symbolic negativity of the phallus lacks and the object a appears. The real dimension of this object that causes anxiety is responsible for throwing the subject into the experience of an indeterminate and excessive negativity that consumes them: jouissance. The Lacanian concept of jouissance comes from Georges Bataille's reflections on the experience of a sovereign and joyful anxiety, laughter, the expression of a desire that lacks nothing, because it is pure excess. Faced with the heavy and servile atmosphere of anxiety at the possibility of death, as it appears in the dialectical tradition of Hegel and Kojève, Bataille finds in laughter a sovereign way of overcoming this sad anxiety at death. Taking into account Bataille's influence on Lacan, we wonder about the possibility of approaching the Lacanian concept of anxiety not as an affection that produces resignation and melancholy, but as an affection that results in the joyful experience of laughter. Thus, this dissertation aims to show that Lacanian psychoanalysis uses the Bataillean concept of sovereign anxiety, laughter, to overcome the Freudian concept of castration anxiety, thus continuing the Rabelaisian tradition of the therapeutic potential of laughter.