Abstract

This dissertation traces the rhetoric of laughter in philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary works of modernism, focussing on the writings of Franz Kafka, his short story "In the Penal Colony" in particular. In this context laughter will be addressed as an issue of epistemology and ethics, hermeneutics and history. ;In the beginning I explore the question of reading laughter as a dialogue between Kafka and de Man. This encounter provides the methodological orientations of my investigation. With de Man one is able to understand the comical inherent in Kafka's texts as a question of linguistic structure rather than as genre. Furthermore de Man's texts themselves have to be interrogated. The key text for de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality," which presents the figures of irony and allegory as crucial, is Baudelaire's "De l'essence de rire." In Baudelaire, on the one hand, the ironic consciousness only comes into being at the cost of the comical body. On the other hand, no means is available to represent this very body in a positive mode. ;For the distinction between different forms of relationships between writing and the body, and therefore of laughter's 'location' within them, I suggest Jean-Luc Nancy's concepts of inscription and exscription. They become apparent as a double-gesture of laughter in literature and its theories. With inscription, I understand the ironic figurations that maintain a distant relation to laughter. The concept of exscription, however, names a different movement toward laughter; not as a more authentic mode of representation, but rather as radicalized in its linguistic unreliability and abandonment analogous to laughter. Where the concept of inscription refers to my discussion of de Man, exscription will be clarified through Freud, Derrida and especially Nancy. Both movements, inscription and exscription, can be elucidated in Kafka's literature, which is located on a critical threshold. In exposing and radicalizing the rhetorical literacy of the literary, laughter must be understood as a constitutive phenomenon of writing and reading in modernity