Excess
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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 (2)
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.77
Tragedy and Pathos > Proximate Genres
Theoretical move: By mapping comedy against its proximate genres, the passage argues that tragedy, comedy, and pathos are differentiated not by subject matter but by how they distribute lack and excess: tragedy insists on pure excess/transcendence, pathos insists on pure lack/finitude, while comedy is uniquely constituted by their intersection and simultaneous coincidence.
The tragic experience is one of excess, in which the tragic subject disdains the limits of the finite world in order to adhere to a transcendent value.
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#02
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.93
Tragedy and Pathos > The Ego and Its Own Lack
Theoretical move: Comedy requires the simultaneous revelation of both the ideal and its material basis — neither pure transcendence nor pure materiality is comic — and its inherently fleeting structure makes it paradoxically speculative and philosophical, unlike the durable forms of tragedy and pathos.
Total immersion in materiality is just as unfunny as complete transcendence of the body.