Coincidence of Lack and Excess
On this page 1 section ›
This concept page does not yet have synthesis content. The extractor flagged it as a load-bearing concept; a future synthesis pass will populate it. The All Occurrences section below shows every place it appears in the corpus.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (1)
-
#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.60
Lack and Excess > Radical Moments of Comedy
Theoretical move: Comedy's radical power lies in forcing the subject to recognize the coincidence of lack and excess within themselves — not merely in the comic object — thereby making enjoyment visible as traumatic, and revealing that enjoyment consists not in overcoming lack but in enjoying lack itself. This transforms comedy from mere entertainment into an ethical act capable of exposing unconscious racism, sexism, and capitalist ideology.
The theoretical task...involves apprehending the comic as such the coincidence of lack and excess. The pressure to separate them and to conceive of them as separate stems from the trauma that their coincidence reveals.