1 - The Laughing Body Politic: The Counter/sovereign Politics of Hobbes’s Theory of Laughter

Summary

[I]t is vain glory, and an argument of little worth, to think the infirmities of another sufficient matter for his triumph.

Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law (2008: 55)

They say truly and properly that say the world is governed by opinion.

Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law (2008: 72)

The first step in developing a critical theory of laughter is to determine laughter's political logic. What is the relationship between laughter and the distributions of logos and phōnē – the notions of who counts as a reasonable speaker and what counts as reasonable speech – that constitute a political community? How exactly do experiences/events of laughter shape and reshape the terrain of power in the contemporary social order? The Nietzschean discourse of gelopolitics examined in the Introduction suggests an answer to this question: by exploding the very distinction between logos and phōnē, laughter disrupts and transforms existing hierarchies of power. However, the Nietzschean discourse's operation on a primarily philosophical register leaves the political implications of laughter's deconstructive activity largely under-theorised. This chapter elucidates the political logic of laughter by turning to a theorist who provides both his own view of the political stakes of the logos/phōnē relationship and his own account of laughter: Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes's goal as a political philosopher is relatively straightforward: to challenge and root out Aristotelianism in all its forms. To that end, he provides an alternative to Aristotle's understanding of the relationship between logos (‘Reason’) and phōnē (‘insignificant speech’, ‘meere sound’ or ‘absurdity’) (Hobbes 2012: 60, 64, 68). Although Hobbes agrees with Aristotle that logos makes political life possible (48), he rejects the notion that what constitutes logos is self-evident or written into the nature of things. ‘REASON,’ Hobbes writes, ‘is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts’ (64). The phrase ‘agreed upon’ here is crucial, as Hobbes believes that the premises that form the object of rational ‘reckoning’ are products of ‘inconstant’, highly idiosyncratic individual sense impressions (62).