Being and Meaning

Being and Meaning names the fundamental schism that structures the subject's existence: the split between the sheer fact of the subject's being (its bare presence, prior to or outside signification) and the meaning it acquires by entering into the symbolic order. In the framework of Zupančič's analysis of comedy in The Odd One In, this dyad is not a simple binary opposition but a constitutive tension — an irreducible vacillation — that cannot be resolved into a stable synthesis. The subject is never simultaneously fully present as being and fully legible as meaning; rather, it oscillates between the two poles in a movement that is endless precisely because no position of full coincidence is available. This structural dislocation — the subject's being displaced from its meaning — is the condition under which primary repression operates: the subject is constituted outside meaning, in the gap opened by the signifier's retroactive production of sense.

The concept draws its theoretical force from the mechanism of comic repetition, which Zupančič theorizes not as mere rehearsal of the same but as repeated staging of this very schism. Each iteration of comic repetition is a fresh encounter with the incongruence between being and meaning, producing sense "errantly" — that is, tangentially, sideways, without landing squarely in either pure presence or pure signification. This errant sense-production is not nonsense; it is rather the oblique trace of a structure that cannot be fronted directly. Comedy, on this account, does not transcend or resolve the split but enacts it, making visible the constitutive impossibility at the heart of the subject's relation to language.

Within short-circuits-alenka-zupancic-the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-the-mit-press-2008, the dyad of Being and Meaning functions as the axis around which Zupančič's entire theory of comic repetition turns. It is positioned at the culmination of the argument (p. 192), where comedy is re-described not as relief or superiority but as an enactment of the fundamental structure of subjectivity. The concept is a direct application and specification of the Lacanian doctrine of Aphanisis: just as aphanisis names the forced oscillation in which the subject can appear as meaning only by fading as being, Being and Meaning names the same split as the operative engine of comedic structure. Where aphanisis describes the general structural fate of all subjects in language, Being and Meaning foregrounds the aesthetic-theatrical dimension of that fate — the way comedy makes the oscillation visible as spectacle rather than concealing it.

The concept also resonates with Automaton and Repetition: comic repetition functions as an automaton-like insistence, the mechanical return of the same incongruence, circling without resolution around the Real of the subject's constitution. The objet petit a and Lack are implicated as the structural underside: the vacancy between being and meaning is the very space in which lack is installed and the object-cause of desire operates. Because the subject's being is "dislocated" from its meaning, no object can close the gap — what Lack theory describes as manque-à-être is precisely the non-coincidence that Being and Meaning stages repeatedly in the comedic register. The concept thus functions as a specification of canonical Lacanian splitting ($), applied concretely to the aesthetics of comedy rather than to clinical or logical topology.

The Odd One In: On ComedyAlenka Zupančič · 2008 (p.192)

her being is dislocated in relation to her meaning... Comic repetition is, essentially, repetition of the vacillation between these two terms of being and meaning

The phrase "dislocated in relation to" is theoretically loaded because it refuses the language of simple absence or negation: being is not absent from meaning but structurally off-center, spatially displaced — which captures the Lacanian point that the split is constitutive, not a defect to be repaired. "Vacillation" then names the dynamic consequence: the subject does not settle on one side but perpetually oscillates, and it is this endless movement — not any fixed content — that comic repetition stages.