라캉과 칸트를 다룬 <실재의 윤리>(도서출판b, 2004)와 독창적인 니체론 <정오의 그림자>(도서출판b, 2005)로 우리에게도 소개된 슬로베니아의 여성 철학자 알렌카 주판치치의 베르그송론을 옮겨놓는다(출처는 http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2006/03/zupancic-lecture.asp.) 보다 정확하게는 강연내용의 정리이다. 지난 봄(06. 03. 06) 강연으로 돼 있는데, 베르그송의 <웃음>을 다루고 있다. 이 <웃음>(1900)은 종로서적판(1989)과 세계사판(1992)로 두 차례 번역/출간된 바 있지만, 아쉽게도 현재는 모두 품절상태인 듯하다. 베르그송 입문서로 가장 얇은, 그렇기에/하지만 가장 쉬운/좋은 책이다.
Alenka Zupancic on Bergson and the Comic, March 2nd 2006
Bergson's "formula" of the comic, namely 'something mechanical encrusted on the living' gives a clear indication of the division at the heart of his conception of comedy: the separation of life (flexible, elastic, light, novel) and the machinic (the automated, the repetitious, the inert, the rigid). Zupancic began with this phrase, arguing that this division formed the core of all the other dyads in Bergson. I argued in questions that it was perhaps rather the opposition soul/matter that was more fundamental, and that any Lacanian re-reading of the comic through a perversely redemptive reading of Bergson's concepts such as 'life' would be in danger of falling into more or less the same theologically 'redemptive' structure as in Bergson's original argument:
(Long quote from Bergson's essay) 'Our starting-point is again "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft.'
Anyway, Zupancic pointed to a fundamental weakness in Bergson's formula that, whilst seemingly specific, is nevertheless too general - in a different vein, the same formula of the 'mechanical encrusted on the living' could easily be applied to the uncanny, for example, the living dead, for example, do they not precisely demonstrate this comedic formula, only in a horrific mode? Are zombies funny? Sometimes...
Bergson's further argument that laughter serves as a 'social corrective' simultaneously reduces the affirmatory elements of comedy (as Hegel argues) to mere forms of scorn and mockery. (Just a banal consequence of Bergson's empirically-driven social conservatism, I would argue, not to mention his ridiculous racism (from 'On Laughter', again): 'why does one laugh at a negro?...I rather fancy the correct answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinary cabby, who applied the expression "unwashed" to the negro fare he was driving. Unwashed! Does not this mean that a black face, in our imagination, is one daubed over with ink or soot? If so, then a red nose can only be one which has received a coating of vermilion. And so we see that the notion of disguise has passed on something of its comic quality to instances in which there is actually no disguise, though there might be').
Bergson overlooks, she argued, the possibility that this formula could instead be the retroactive (and reactionary) effect of comedy itself - alternatively put, is not the mechanical rather constitutive of life itself? If we remove the mechanical do we really get pure liveliness/spirit? No! Life is already an imitation of life - repetition (in language/personality) does not persist purely on one side (the 'bad', heavy side) of the comedic/non-comedic division. Comedy plays not with the mechanism/life opposition, Zupancic continued, but with the inconsistency of the one (as subject) - the fact that the two elements identified by Bergson function in fact 'in a most intimate bond', rather than a disjunctive one, and that it is ultimately impossible to separate the two terms because of the 'insistence' of the one qua (incomplete) subject - traversed by language, not prey to the discrepancies between the spirit and the letter, exactly, but rather the way in which the spirit emerges out of the mechanical letter...slips of the tongue, the way language itself is productive of thought...
Zupancic quoted Groucho Marx (Driftwood) and Mrs Claypool from Night of the Opera so as to demonstrate the effect of comic imitation at the very heart of 'personality':
'That woman?
Do you know why I sat with her?
Because she reminded me of you.
- Really?
- Of course.
That's why I'm here with you,
because you remind me of you.
Your eyes, your throat, your lips...
Everything about you reminds me of you...
except you.'
Is the mechanical thus an essential feature of life, rather than its comedic antonym? Zupancic briefly turned to a discussion of 'drive' in Lacan, though this was (unfortunately) not really cashed out. Questions drew upon the relationship between Freud and Bergson (and why it was that the former's book on jokes was so unfunny), what the relationship between life and theatre was, if we are already 'playing' at life, so to speak. Also, didn't we also need to understand what the temporality of laughter was in order to understand comedy (comic timing, etc.); what were the cultural/historical dimensions of mechanism, and didn't we really need to be aware of them in order to put Bergson's claims about machines etc. into context?
Zupancic concluded that we needed to read Bergson's own examples against him: to examine the real structure at work in them and show how vivacity emerges, not against, but from within repetition.
06. 08. 13.