Abstract

Within democracies, the self-understandings of its citizens form the foundation for workable democratic institutions. Instead of focusing on what these self-understandings are or how they are formed, my thesis instead revolves around theoretical and practical tactics for engaging the limits of these self-understandings. How can we encourage ourselves, as well as others, to reexamine our often implicit and unacknowledged undemocratic habits and attitudes, whatever they may be? How can we become aware of our own oppressive modes of thinking, thinking that manifests itself not only at the level of the law and overt political action but also at the level of ordinary everyday practices and behaviors? To include this level within the scope of "political" analysis, I situate my definition of the political within the feminist mantra "the personal is political," Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of ressentiment and Michel Foucault's conception of power. This unusual delimiting of the "political" thus demands unusual tactics for achieving "political" action. I offer laughter as one such tactic. Along with the emancipatory uses of Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogy and irony, laughter emerges as a potentially effective tactic, an epistemological tool that can be used to jolt us out of implicitly and passively oppressive "normal" thinking and acting. While laughter as ridicule has long been used to solidify hierarchical and oppressive concepts and structures, other types of laughter can help us open up spaces to think differently. Laughter in this sense can act like a catalyst, physically provoking a reaction that could lead to the self-questioning and rethinking crucial to democratic discourse. This type of laughter cannot eliminate, change or undo our past habits of thinking, but it can perhaps help eliminate the constraint of those past habits by corporeally interrupting their metaphysical comfort. It is essential in this sense that laughter is of the body, the same body upon which the cruelty and discipline described by Nietzsche and Foucault have been inscribed. The capacity for laughter and the possibility of an accompanying burst of incongruity means that the discipline of the body is not total, that some moment of creative impulse has not been tamed