Exception and Exclusion
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.162
Outside and Inside > The Excluded Inside
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Chaplin's greatest comedy (The Great Dictator) achieves its force by identifying the figure of symbolic authority with the constitutively excluded excess, but then collapses into a sentimental fantasy of total inclusion—a fantasy that, far from resolving exclusion, structurally reproduces and even tends toward fascism, because any social whole requires an excluded exception to maintain its illusion of wholeness.
The political problem with this remedy is that it is precisely the dream of universal inclusion that necessitates exclusion. A society can only construct the illusion of wholeness through a figure of exception not included within the whole.