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The Odd One In: On Comedy

Alenka Zupančič

by Alenka Zupancic (2008)

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Synopsis

Alenka Zupančič's The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008) advances a sustained philosophical argument that comedy is not merely a genre or a collection of techniques but a structural mode of encountering the Real — specifically, the Real as the constitutive impossibility that inhabits every symbolic order and every living being. The book proceeds in three movements: first, it recruits Hegel's account of comedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit to argue that comedy enacts the passage from abstract to concrete universality, collapsing the gap of representation so that substance becomes subject by alienating itself from itself rather than from the individual; second, it anatomizes the principal "figures" of comedy — the comic character (ego and id), the double (ego and ego), and the role of the Other — showing each to be a variant of the structural short circuit between two constitutively exclusive elements that comedy alone can sustain; and third, it develops a set of conceptualizations — against Bergson's mechanical/living binary, against Deleuze's ontology of difference, and in dialogue with Lacan's account of repetition, objet petit a, and the phallus — to give comedy its precise psychoanalytic and ontological coordinates. Zupančič's central thesis is that the "comic object" (x in her formula 1/2 + 1/2 = 1 + x) is nothing other than the surplus that emerges when an imaginary One splits and the two resulting halves cannot be cleanly separated, a surplus she identifies with objet petit a as effect-cause of a suspended symbolic Other. The book concludes with an "Essential Appendix" on the phallus, arguing that the Lacanian phallic signifier is precisely the signifier of the missing link between the biological and the Symbolic, and that comedy — from Aristophanic phallic processions to Molière and Chaplin — is the human practice that structurally performs the desublimating operation of making this link appear as the finite, trivial object it always was.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes The Odd One In within the Lacanian-theoretical corpus is that it makes comedy — not tragedy, not horror, not the thriller — the privileged site for thinking the relation between the Real and the Symbolic. Where most Lacanian cultural theory (including Žižek's own extensive work) tends to treat comedy as an occasional illustration, Zupančič systematically argues that comedy is constitutively organized around the very gap that Lacanian theory names as the objet petit a and surplus-jouissance. Her formula — the comic object as the surplus x that prevents 1/2 + 1/2 from amounting to One — is genuinely original and gives a precise algebraic form to what had previously been described only qualitatively. By theorizing comedy as the "genre of the copula" (the genre that stages the missing link between life and the Symbolic), Zupančič produces a structural account that is simultaneously a theory of enjoyment, a theory of the subject, and a theory of the political limits of ideology.

A second distinctive contribution is the book's treatment of repetition. By situating Lacan's account of tyché and automaton in direct and extended debate with Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Zupančič does something no other text in the Short Circuits series does: she uses comedy as a philosophical laboratory for adjudicating between two major competing accounts of repetition. Her argument — that the Lacanian Real is not opposed to the Symbolic but is its constitutive impasse, and that comedy is the practice of "repeating this repetition" at the level of mechanical, exterior staging — functions both as a reading of comedy and as a substantive intervention in post-Deleuzian Continental philosophy. The book thereby positions itself not only as Lacanian film/literary theory but as a contribution to the philosophy of repetition, difference, and the subject.

Finally, the book's extended treatment of the phallic signifier and castration — framed through Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium and linked back to the formula of the comic object — demonstrates a rare capacity to connect Lacan's most contested and controversial concept to a concrete, historically grounded analysis of comedic form. Rather than defending the phallus as "merely symbolic," Zupančič argues that Lacan's insistence on the term has a precise realist motivation: the male organ, in its anatomical peculiarity (relative autonomy of enjoyment, detachability, localizable interval between body and pleasure), makes visible precisely what castration names as the universal condition of both sexes. This desublimating move — comedy shows the finite, embarrassing object behind the sublime veil — is the book's deepest claim and its most durable contribution to Lacanian theory.

Main themes

  • Comedy as the concrete universal: the substance alienating itself from itself rather than from the individual subject
  • The comic object as objet petit a: the surplus x that prevents imaginary oneness from closing
  • Physics of the infinite against metaphysics of finitude: the 'inhuman' element within the human as comedy's true domain
  • Repetition as constitutive of comedy: comedy as the mechanical, exterior staging of primary repression and the subject's vacillation between being and meaning
  • Lacan versus Deleuze on repetition: tyché as the gap internal to automaton, versus Deleuzian 'realization of ontology'
  • The temporality of the comical: comedy stands at the point of satisfaction (jouissance) while tragedy stands at the point of demand (desire)
  • Castration as coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir): the condition of enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability
  • The phallus as signifier of the missing link between the biological and the Symbolic, and comedy as the practice that materializes this link
  • Ideology and comedy: the short circuit between ego-ideal and comic partial object as disidentification rather than identification
  • The comic suspension of the Other and its retroactive effects: the Other returns from comedy altered, no longer the same Master

Chapter outline

  • Introduction — p.1-22
  • The Concrete Universal (Part I: The Absolute on the Couch) — p.23-53
  • The Universal-at-Work (Part I continued) — p.39-53
  • Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite (Part I) — p.54-120
  • Figures of Comedy (Part II: The Ego and the It; The Ego and the Ego; The Other and the Other) — p.61-120
  • Another Turn of the Bergsonian Screw (Part III) — p.110-148
  • Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical (Part III) — p.128-165
  • Repetition (Part III) — p.148-194
  • (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus — Enjoyment ex machina — p.183-212
  • Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? / Concluding Remarks — p.200-230

Chapter summaries

Introduction (p.1-22)

Zupančič opens by insisting that comic subjectivity resides not in any authorial subject or represented ego but in comedy's own irresistible, all-consuming movement — a movement punctuated by stumbling, fixation, and passionate attachment that constitutes its object-related dimension. Following Hegel, she positions the book's central claim: the comic is not merely a technique or attitude but a structural mode whose movement is itself the subject. The introduction explicitly distances this project from the ideological coordinates of both fanatical repression of laughter (the medieval Jorge of Eco's novel) and its liberal-humanist rehabilitation as 'healthy irony.' Zupančič argues that ironic distance is in fact a perfect lubricant for dominant ideology: it is precisely where we feel most free, most autonomous, most playfully detached, that ideology has its firmest grip on us. Real comedy, by contrast, introduces a cut or non-immediacy into the very feelings and naturalized differences that ideology smooths over.

The introduction also performs a terminological clarification that governs the entire book: 'comedy' and 'comical' are used in a specific, restricted sense distinguishable from jokes, irony, and humor in their specificity, even as these modes interpenetrate in practice. The distinction between the comical as a singular form of funniness and the joke structure is flagged as central to Part III. Zupančič ends by noting that philosophy's own 'intrinsic comedy' — its refusal to stop when things no longer serve an immediate purpose — is what licenses the enterprise of philosophizing comedy at all.

Key concepts: Comic subjectivity, Ideology, Ironic distance, Comical vs. joke, Movement and interruption Notable examples: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Jorge the monk; President Bush's 'Bushisms'

The Concrete Universal (Part I: The Absolute on the Couch) (p.23-53)

This opening chapter of Part I reads Hegel's account of comedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit — appearing within 'Religion in the Form of Art,' covering the triad epos–tragedy–comedy — as a structural argument about the relationship between universality, individuality, and self-consciousness. Zupančič reconstructs the Hegelian claim that in comedy the individual self becomes 'the absolute being': not because the concrete opposes or mocks the universal, but because in comedy the universal undergoes its own self-alienation, becoming subject by relating to itself. In the epic, the subject narrates the universal; in tragedy, the subject enacts it; in comedy, the subject is it, which is to say the universal becomes the acting subject. This is what Zupančič compresses into the slogan 'comedy is the universal at work.'

The chapter then draws the Hegelian–Lacanian parallel with precision: the Hegelian transition from comedy to the Incarnation (Christ's death as the real death of the Beyond, not its return to transcendence) maps onto the Lacanian insight that genuine transformation requires a shift not only in subjective consciousness but in the external Symbolic Other in which the unconscious is materialized. The 'short circuit' between the lack in the subject and the lack in the Other is the properly comic — and properly analytic — moment of experience. Lacan's characterization of Hegel's Phenomenology as un humour fou (a crazy humor) is invoked to anchor this alignment.

The Chaplin example from The Gold Rush — where Chaplin himself plays the hallucinated chicken Big Jim sees — is read as the paradigm case of this short circuit: comedy is not the discrepancy between what Charlie really is and how Jim misperceives him, but the fact that Charlie himself displays 'the characteristics which exactly coincide with the movements of the chicken.' The other actor who attempted the scene in the costume failed precisely because he was only 'a man in a chicken costume'; Chaplin 'could be a chicken.' This is the comic short circuit in miniature: not representation but coincidence.

Key concepts: Concrete universal, Comedy as universal at work, Short circuit (Hegel), Incarnation, Symbolic Other, Substance becomes subject Notable examples: Chaplin, The Gold Rush (chicken scene); Aristophanes (Hegel's comedy reference); Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ (contrastive)

The Universal-at-Work (Part I continued) (p.39-53)

This section deepens the Hegelian argument by distinguishing the conservative paradigm of comedy — in which the concrete individual mocks the universal, producing the distance needed to sustain ideology — from genuine comedy, in which the universal itself becomes the subject by losing its abstract self-identity. Zupančič uses the Bush 'Bushisms' as an illustration: the truly comic moments are not when Bush self-deprecatingly plays the fool for the cameras, but when he solemnly acts as the American President who genuinely believes he is the American President — when he cannot help but enact the short circuit between the ego-ideal and the comic partial object. The conservative version (displaying the obscene underside of the master) is shown to consolidate rather than subvert the Master-Signifier.

The chapter introduces the Lacanian reformulation: in comedy, 'one moment of the substance represents the subject for another moment of the substance,' a formulation very close to Lacan's account of signification. This sets up the transition from abstract to concrete universality as a movement that does not abolish representation but transforms its logic — a movement the book will connect, via the comic object, to objet petit a as effect-cause rather than mere effect of the symbolic structure. The passage to Christianity (God becomes man, the Beyond really dies) is read as the speculative core that comedy shares with the Lacanian premise: there is no Other of the Other, and the comedy of the Absolute is that it needs to become its own subject.

Key concepts: Abstract vs. concrete universality, Disidentification, Ego-ideal as comic partial object, Representation transformed, Master-Signifier Notable examples: George W. Bush 'Bushisms'; Monty Python (alluded to); Hegel on comedy and Christianity

Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite (Part I) (p.54-120)

This long and central chapter of Part I develops Zupančič's counter-argument against the 'contemporary metaphysics of finitude' — the tendency to think comedy through the lens of acceptance of human limitation, weakness, and mortality. Drawing on Nathan Scott's argument linking Christian Incarnation with comedy, she distinguishes a genuine materialist comedy from a 'spiritualist' humanist one. The spiritualist reading (Scott, and the metaphysics of finitude more broadly) merely acknowledges limitation from within a logic that still posits the Significant as radically transcendent. True comic materialism, by contrast, does not close off the finite in relation to the infinite but includes the infinite in the immanence as the heterogeneous element that makes a man 'not simply a man.' The true comic axiom is not 'man is only man' (which is abstract idealism) but 'a man is not a man.'

The chapter then develops the two fundamental comic procedures by which the 'missing link' between two constitutively exclusive sides of reality is made to appear. The first is the sudden intrusion of the other side followed by an 'impossible articulation' of both sides in the same frame — illustrated by the mobile-phone adultery sketch where the lover emerges from the closet, apologizes for his intrusive phone call, and returns to the closet. The second is the invention of the comic Character — theorized through Walter Benjamin's notion of the einziger Zug (unary trait) as the singular coincidence of signifier and body, making the comic character the visible short circuit between ego and id.

The chapter then pivots to the ego-and-ego structure via an extended reading of Plautus and Molière's Amphitryon. Sosie's encounter with Mercury-as-Sosie is read as comedy's discovery that 'egos exist' — that the ego is an object among objects, an eminently comic character. The dialogue between the two Sosies is not simply a deconstruction of imaginary unity into multiplicity (though it is that) but the production of an impossible link between constitutively exclusive sides, an 'invisible thread' that prevents the two from simply becoming 'two ones.' The formula 'I swear to you, I was there before I had arrived' is shown to be not mere paradox but the most accurate description of the comic situation. Zupančič then turns to Marivaux's The Game of Love and Chance to theorize the 'other and the Other' figure of comedy: here access to the Real is achieved not by stripping away symbolic fiction but by redoubling it, so that a second imaginary mirror-turn produces an inner minimal difference constitutive of the Symbolic — the path to truth leads through double artifice.

The chapter concludes with the theory of comic suspense (suspense 'after the fact' — starting when the catastrophe has already happened), the identification of the comic object with Lacan's objet petit a as paradoxical 'effect-cause' (not merely an effect of the structure of desire but the point at which cause and effect coincide), and a reading of Molière's Amphitryon and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors as demonstrations that the Other, once comically suspended, does not return intact — the restored Master is one stripped of unquestioned authority, pointing toward a shift in the symbolic coordinates themselves.

Key concepts: Physics of the infinite, Comic object (objet petit a as effect-cause), Comic Character (unary trait), Double/ego-and-ego, Comic suspense (after the fact), Missing link, Möbius topology of the Real Notable examples: Nathan Scott on comedy and Incarnation; Mobile phone adultery sketch; Chaplin, The Gold Rush; Plautus, Amphitryon; Molière, Amphitryon (Sosie dialogue); Marivaux, The Game of Love and Chance; Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors

Figures of Comedy (Part II: The Ego and the It; The Ego and the Ego; The Other and the Other) (p.61-120)

Part II (which is largely developed within the long chapter above) consolidates three structural figures of comedy. The first, 'The Ego and the It,' concerns the visibility of the split between ego and id — as in the figure of someone suddenly falling flat on the street, where the imaginary unity of the composed person is decomposed into two entities: the 'ego' that continues walking and the 'It' that lies flat. Comedy stretches this momentary short circuit into an extended scene by 'refusing to cut the comedy.' The unary trait (Zug) is theorized as the coincidence of signifier and jouissance — making the comic character's enjoyment visible as belonging to the 'It,' not the subject, thereby exposing the missing link that normally sutures imaginary unity.

The second figure, 'The Ego and the Ego,' uses the Amphitryon tradition to show that what makes the double comic is not the deconstruction of unity into multiplicity but the production of an impossible sustained link between two constitutively exclusive sides. The ego, once split, cannot escape its double; the 'I' is irreducibly fastened to the 'I' of another. The third figure, 'The Other and the Other,' concerns Marivaux's dialectics of redoubling: comedy's route to the Real runs through a second fictional layer, not through its removal. The Marivaudian universe is distinguished from Romanticism precisely by situating the Real in the space of 'pure inner difference produced by the redoubling of fiction.' Zupančič closes this section with the theory of comic trust or credit: the comic subject's unshakeable (naïve) faith in the Other is not mere foolishness but the very condition under which unexpected satisfaction becomes possible — invoking Lacan's les non-dupes errent as the formula for the comic subject's relationship to the lack in the Other.

Key concepts: Ego and It (id), Unary trait / Zug, Double (alter ego), Redoubling of fiction, Non-dupes errant, Comic trust/credit Notable examples: Person falling flat on street (gag structure); Molière, Amphitryon (Sosie dialogue); Marivaux, The Game of Love and Chance

Another Turn of the Bergsonian Screw (Part III) (p.110-148)

This chapter takes Bergson's famous formula — du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant (something mechanical encrusted on the living) — and submits it to an immanent critique that transforms it into something closer to Lacanian drive theory. Bergson's formula is initially credited for correctly identifying the two levels involved in the comic, but is then shown to rest on a fantasmatic presupposition: the notion of a 'pure living personality' that preexists mechanical encrustation. Zupančič argues that this pure life is itself a retroactive effect, a screen produced by the very operation of comic imitation. When we imitate someone, we do not extract the mechanical from the living; rather, by relating a habit to itself, we produce 'pure life' as an object — as something that appears, for the first time, when viewed from the outside.

The critical move is: the 'mechanical element' in comedy is not one of two pre-given poles but names the very relationship between any two poles. It is the relation of self-reference or self-imitation that makes automatism appear, and the automatic repetition that makes 'life' appear. Zupančič then deploys a Lacanian counter-thesis: life is not reducible to itself; it is constitutively split. It is the non-coincidence of life with itself that generates the crack through which the comic operates. The comic thus works not by extracting mechanism from life but by relating life to itself so that 'pure life' appears as an object — a formulation that directly anticipates the theory of the drive as 'indestructible life' produced through repetition. The examples of Harpagon's avarice and Sganarelle-vs.-Pancrace demonstrate that what makes mechanical repetition compelling is not its mechanical character per se but the life-force it expresses — which inverts Bergson's polarity entirely. Comedy's real insight, Zupančič proposes, is that the drive is the gap opened by repetition itself, not a prior vitality that repetition merely interrupts.

Key concepts: Bergson's formula (mechanical/living), Life as non-self-identical, Automatism as relationship not pole, Drive as product of repetition, Indestructible life Notable examples: Bergson, Laughter; Molière, The Miser (Harpagon); Molière, The Flying Doctor (Sganarelle and Pancrace)

Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical (Part III) (p.128-165)

This chapter provides the book's most precise structural differentiation of comedy from both tragedy and the joke. Tragedy and comedy share a fundamental discrepancy or incongruity, but they structure it differently: tragedy structures it with the parameters and dialectics of desire (the gap between demand and satisfaction), standing at the point of demand, while comedy stands at the point of satisfaction — or rather, at the point of a satisfaction that arrives too soon and overtakes demand. Comedy and comic satisfaction thrive on discrepancy as a source of pleasure rather than pain; the comic 'happy ending' is not a reversal of prior misfortune but the continuation of a joyful movement that has been operative all along.

The distinction between comedy and the joke is then developed in temporal terms. A joke is always final — it produces its point (and its satisfaction) instantaneously at the end, and the narrative preceding it is merely preparatory. Comic pleasure, by contrast, is not instantaneous: it is inaugurated by an opening 'sparkle' that produces a surplus-object rather than a conclusion, and this surplus functions as the motor of the subsequent comic sequence. Zupančič schematizes this as the difference between a point de capiton that closes (the joke's S1) and an objet petit a that opens (the comic inaugural surplus). The extended 'Hu's on First' sketch (the Bush–Condi Rice dialogue about the Chinese leader Hu) is analyzed in detail to show how a joke-quilting-point (Hu/who) is immediately transformed into a comic object that is stretched, reversed, and snowballed, generating new quilting points (Yassir, Kofi, Rice) — a process of 'staccato fluidity' or continuous discontinuity. The structural affinity between comedy and love is noted: both are organized around an object that incarnates the impossibility of complementarity rather than enabling desire through inaccessibility, and love's duration can be said to be 'structured like comedy.'

Key concepts: Tragedy vs. comedy (desire vs. jouissance), Temporality of the joke vs. comedy, Point de capiton, Objet petit a as inaugural surplus, Staccato fluidity, Love structured like comedy Notable examples: 'Hu's on First' (Bush-Condi Rice sketch); Shakespeare, Othello (epigraph on wit); Marx Brothers, Duck Soup (endnotes)

Repetition (Part III) (p.148-194)

The longest chapter in Part III begins from Marx's reworking of Hegel — history repeats, first as tragedy, second as farce — and develops into a philosophical confrontation between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Lacan's account of repetition from Seminar XI. The chapter's explicit aim is to show that comedy has a deeper affinity with repetition than as mere technique: repetition is constitutive of the comic genre as such, and this is why comedy is not an anecdotic problem for philosophy but an immanently philosophical problem.

For Deleuze, repetition realizes ontology: Being is Difference, and the only access to it is repetition as a movement that extracts the new from the mechanism of repetition, ultimately arriving (via Nietzsche's eternal return) at a selectivity that affirms only what is affirmed by its own eternal return. Zupančič's critique is that Deleuze's project aims at abolishing the difference between the Symbolic and the Real — a 'realization of the Symbolic' — and that his radical difference ultimately functions as the only Real, making the Lacanian three registers collapse into one. The Deleuzian eternal return reinstates an absolute (asubjective) law that undermines the very subjective edge his political-philosophical predicates require. Comedy and tragedy both belong, on Deleuze's schema, to being-as-out-of-joint, which is precisely what is left behind by 'realized ontology' — suggesting that Deleuzian philosophy has no room for comedy as a structural form.

For Lacan, by contrast, the symbolic cut is primary: the real is neither a substance nor a process but something that interrupts a process — a stumbling block, an impossibility in the structure of the field of reality. Tyché (the encounter with the Real) is not opposed to automaton (the return of signs, the pleasure principle) but is the gap internal to automaton; Repetition repeats the signifying dyad of alienation, and in repeating its constitutive gap it produces the objet petit a as the subject's fleeting self-encounter in the Real (the fort/da example: what the child repeats is not the mother's absence but his own fundamental split — and the bobbin is a 'detachable part of himself,' which is the definition of objet petit a). Repetition and primary repression are co-extensive; the primarily repressed signifier can never be 'remembered,' only reconstructed through the work of repetition.

The chapter concludes with the return to comedy: if tragedy is structured by the deployment of all possible subjective meanings of the primarily repressed signifier (interpretation, working through), comedy is the mechanical, exterior repetition of the very structure of primary repression — staging the Master-Signifier as an object of experimental play rather than as an anchor of heroic identity. Comic repetition is the repeated staging of the schism between being and meaning, doing so not by revealing nonsense directly but by producing sense errantly, so that at the limit of incongruence the very structure of primary repression is enacted. This is why comedy has often been seen as 'childish': it returns to the kind of textual, mechanical repetition that children demand (and that adults cover over with narrative variety), which is itself the most radical demand — the demand that the same be repeated in its very impossibility.

Key concepts: Repetition (Lacan vs. Deleuze), Tyché and automaton, Objet petit a as detachable part, Fort/da, Primary repression, Comedy as mechanical exterior repetition, Tragedy vs. comedy (interpretation vs. repetition), Eternal return critique Notable examples: Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire; Freud, fort/da game; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; Seminar XI (tyché/automaton); Shakespeare, Hamlet (Polonius/Julius Caesar exchange); Shakespeare, Hamlet (gravedigger scene)

(Essential) Appendix: The Phallus — Enjoyment ex machina (p.183-212)

This appendix — designated 'essential' rather than supplementary — provides the theoretical foundation for what was implicit in the formula of the comic object throughout the book. Beginning from the observation that the sum of two halves produces a surplus (x = 1 – (1/2 + 1/2), where x is the comic object), Zupančič locates the canonical philosophical treatment of this problem in Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium: human beings were once spherical wholes, cut in half by Zeus, who then relocated the genitals from back to front so that the two halves could meet in an embrace. The myth's profound comic dimension lies not in the 'romantic' reading (we seek our lost other half) but in the structural observation that the cut produces not simply two halves but a surplus — an 'appendix' enjoyment that is both constitutively dislocated from the body and constitutively attached to it. This is Lacan's concept of castration: not mere amputation but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus expressed in the double meaning of plus-de-jouir ('no more enjoyment' / 'more enjoyment').

Zupančič argues that castration is not an operator of lack alone but precisely the condition of enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability — the machina responsible for the status of enjoyment as essentially ex machina. Because enjoyment is separated from the body by this necessary interval, it can walk away in any direction, find itself in the most unexpected activities, be objectified and shared. This explains why the comic character's structure is not that of a subject opposed to structure but of a 'subjectivized point of the structure itself' running wild: the character's jouissance belongs to the 'It,' not the subject, and this is what the comic short circuit makes visible.

The appendix closes with a precise account of identification and its comic subversion. Identification requires that the joint between the Master-Signifier (S1) and the enjoyment attached to it (a) remain hidden. The formula of identification is S1/a (S1 above the bar, a below). Displaying the obscene underside of the master (a above the bar, S1 below) does not break identification — it consolidates it, as contemporary mastery via public display of enjoyment demonstrates. What breaks identification is locating and displaying the precise point of articulation between S1 and a — making visible their 'encrustation' onto each other — which produces their disarticulation. This is what comedy achieves, and why it is irreducible to both irony and obscenity.

Key concepts: Castration as lack-and-surplus (plus-de-jouir), Enjoyment ex machina, Comic object formula, Aristophanes' myth, Identification formula (S1/a), Disarticulation of S1 and a Notable examples: Plato, Symposium (Aristophanes' speech); Plato, Timaeus (wandering womb / male organ passage); Aristotle, Poetics (phallic songs); Hegel, Phenomenology (conjunction of high and low)

Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? / Concluding Remarks (p.200-230)

This final section (whose title alludes to Hölderlin's question about the poet in a destitute time, here ironically displaced onto the phallus) addresses directly the controversy over the Lacanian phallic signifier. Against those who want to replace 'castration' and 'phallus' with culturally neutral language about human limitation and finitude, Zupančič argues that the term 'phallus' in Lacan has a precise realist motivation: the male organ, in its anatomical peculiarity, makes visible what is otherwise invisible — the relative autonomy of enjoyment, its localizable character, its status as something that can be excluded, detached, annexed. The anatomical peculiarity is not the ground of a phallocentric privilege but the occasion of a desublimating demonstration: here, in this finite, embarrassing, unheroic object, is what castration looks like when you strip away the mystifying cultural patina. The feminist objection that the phallic signifier reinstates phallocentrism is, Zupančič argues, itself a 'remystification' in the Jungian tradition — a culturally neutralized version that converts the real impasse of human sexuality into a dignified archetype.

The concluding remarks then draw together the argument that comedy is essentially the 'genre of the copula' — the signifying articulation of the missing link between life and the Symbolic, between the biological and the cultural. The two-and-a-half-thousand-year history of the phallus in comedy (from Aristophanic phallic processions to the leather phallus costumes of early Greek comedy) is not a historical curiosity but a structural symptom: the phallus, appearing as a partial object rather than a signifier, materializes the constitutive contradiction between the two registers whose 'impossible articulation' is comedy's central project. Comedy's realism is the realism of the Real of desire and drive, not the reality principle; it is the genre that insists on showing — not the sublime behind the veil — but the finite, trivial, ridiculous object that was there all along, holding the veil up from below.

Key concepts: Phallic signifier as desublimation, Comedy as genre of the copula, Missing link (biological/Symbolic), Castration demystified, Realism of the Real Notable examples: Aristotle on phallic songs and comedy's origins; Aristophanic phallic processions and costuming; Hölderlin (title allusion); Agnes Heller on comedy and existential tension

Main interlocutors

  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
  • Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
  • Henri Bergson, Laughter
  • Plato, Symposium
  • Plato, Timaeus
  • Aristotle, Poetics
  • Molière, Amphitryon
  • Plautus, Amphitryon
  • Shakespeare, Hamlet
  • Shakespeare, Othello
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject
  • Mladen Dolar
  • Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Position in the corpus

The Odd One In sits at an intersection of Lacanian cultural theory, philosophy of comedy, and the philosophy of repetition. Within the Short Circuits series edited by Žižek, it is the most sustained philosophical treatment of a single aesthetic genre, and it is best read after acquiring basic familiarity with Lacanian concepts — especially the objet petit a, jouissance, the Real/Symbolic/Imaginary triad, and the formula of fantasy — as laid out in introductory texts such as Lorenzo Chiesa's Subjectivity and Otherness (also in the series) or Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. Readers who have worked through Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More (also Short Circuits) will recognize the shared interest in the partial object and its comic-theoretical implications; Dolar is in fact cited several times on the Amphitryon tradition and on the object-voice. The book's extended debate with Deleuze rewards readers who have some familiarity with Difference and Repetition, and its Hegelian framework is most accessible to those who have read some secondary literature on the Phenomenology.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian corpus, The Odd One In complements Žižek's extensive but dispersed analyses of comedy in works like The Plague of Fantasies and The Parallax View (which deal with the comic more episodically) and extends Zupančič's own earlier Ethics of the Real (Verso, 2000), which developed Lacanian ethics via Kant and tragedy. The move from tragedy to comedy as the privileged genre marks a decisive theoretical shift: where tragedy sublimates the real impasse into heroic singularity, comedy repeats it mechanically and on the exterior, and this shift has direct consequences for how one thinks sublimation, identification, and the political. Readers interested in the philosophy of comedy beyond the Lacanian frame — Bergson, Cavell on Hollywood comedy, Aristotle — will find the book a productive interlocutor, though it deliberately avoids systematic survey in favor of conceptual depth."]

Canonical concepts deployed