This critical intervention in the study of the comic seeks to investigate how the comic act is also an expressive and performative philosophical act that precedes philosophical conceptualisation. The book puts Bergson, philosophy and the body at the centre of its investigation, and uses these elements to explore five different aspects of the field, from the history and philosophy of comedy, to film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future. Through this, the volume develops a theoretical and practice-based framework and is a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners alike in the fields of philosophy, performance studies and comedy studies, among others. List of Contributors: Caterina Angela Agus, Fred Dalmasso. Lisabeth During, Xavier Escribano, Giovanni Fusetti, Davide Giovanzana, Josephine Gray, Maria J. Ortega Manez, Meg Munford, Jean-Michel Rabate, Carolyn Shapiro, Lisa Trahair
Lisa Trahair teaches in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is author of The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (2007). She has published widely on film comedy and on the philosophy of comedy in journals devoted to film and the theoretical humanities and has co-edited several special issues of journals devoted to the intersection of film and philosophy. Her current projects include directing the Cinematic Thinking Network and co-authoring a book on Understanding Cinematic Thinking (with Gregory Flaxman and Robert Sinnerbrink). Josephine Gray is (with Anmar Taha) artistic director of Iraqi Bodies, a physical theatre group based in Gothenburg, Sweden, dedicated to exploring the links between movement and gesture, dance and physical theatre. Her experimental practice is anchored in the theory and method of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, among others. She is a graduate of L'ecole Internationale de Theatre de Jacques Lecoq and has a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, for which she wrote a thesis on the philosophy of comic performance in the work of Henri Bergson and Jacques Lecoq.
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Comedy: Towards an Alternative History of Mimesis, by Maria J. Ortega Manez Chapter 2. The Two Laughters of Lecoq: The Clown and the Bouffon, by Caterina Angela Agus, Giovani Fusetti and Davide Giovanzana Chapter 3. The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou's Philosophy, by Fred Dalmasso Chapter 4. The Body that Laughs and Cries: Helmuth Plessner's Keys to Anthropology and Theatre, by Xavier Escribano Chapter 5. Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity: Ridiculing Rigidity as an Impediment to Social Change, by Meg Mumford Chapter 6. Happiness, Dead and Alive: Object Theatre as Philosophy of the Encounter, by Carolyn Shapiro Chapter 7. Living in the Doll House: Cavell, Comedy and The Ladies Man, by Lisa Trahair Chapter 8. Trouble in Paradise?: Impotence and Comedy, by Lisabeth During Chapter 9. "Only What Is Born Lives": Kafka L.O.L., by Jean-Michel Rabate Chapter 10. The Grotesque: Comic Performance and the Paradox of Acting, by Josephine Gray About the Authors
