Lorenzo Marinucci -  Panel 17 ENOJP Paris
Channel: European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Date: 2018-03-10

“Understanding Laughter, Laughter as Understanding: Irony
and Comic as Thought within Japanese Culture” — Lorenzo Marinucci, University of Rome, Tor Vergata

While the very first philosopher in the Western canon, Socrates, is pretty well known to have been an ironist, it is hard to find many other exceptions in the history of seriousness of Western thought. What has motivated the exclusion of laughter and irony from Western discussions on reality, thought and understanding? I would like to pose this question, and attempt a broader understanding of the continuum going from irony as a mode of denegation to the embodied phenomenon of laughter by observing in a phenomenological perspective three moments of hilarity within Japanese culture: firstly the divine burlesque of Ame no Izume no Mikoto in front of Amaterasu’s hiding, and the textual relation with the archaic aesthetic notion of omoshiroki (funny and beautiful) proposed by Okazaki Yoshie and Imamichi Tomonobu; secondly the Zen employment of laughter and irony as tool of understanding, concentrating on Ikkyū Sōjun’s modes of fūryū (“poetic,” “erotic,” “comic”); thirdly the double role of linguistic irony in Basho’s school of haikai (literally “comic verse”), and its connection to the negative aesthetics of sabi according to Ōnishi Yoshinori’s system of Aesthetics. From this triangle of sources I would like to attempt an integrated definition of irony and laughter through the notion of “emptiness,” in its linguistic, conceptual and embodied declinations.

This talk took place at the 3rd Conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy in Paris, Université Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris 1) and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) from November 2-4, 2017. 

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