IAS Laughter: Cartoon-o-phobia
by Natasha Eaton
5 January 2021
© Zunar. Courtesy of the artist. This image depicts the Malaysia Sedition Act of 1948. Originally implemented by the colonial authorities, this act criminalizes ‘seditious speech’, and has been used to crack down on anti-corruption activists.
CARTOON-O-PHOBIA Whose flaming ink burns. For passion, for laughter, for acuity.
Laughter: etymology Old English hlaehahan, onomatopoeic in tone (almost). Rire in all its ambiguity — and how Joyce made Derrida laugh.
Does laughter invite aphorism, whether verbal or visual? Laughter’s flight, its vision: Ulysses, Dionysus, and more.
‘We should consider every truth false unless it is accompanied by at least one laugh’ — Nietzsche.
To laugh is, as Kluge and Negt suggest, to raise the diaphragm.[i]Those laughs which draw from deep within the body – their gymnastics and their silence. Laughter, then, as catharsis — the modus operandi for venturing into the public sphere. What this public sphere might be is not easy to determine: sedition, censorship, the sly violence of images, …? The public, laughing — is this more than the raucous, the noise of the crowd? And what does it mean for an image to laugh? Not the smile nor the pragmatism of Bergson, who argues for a certain vitalism – how the body explodes in laughter.[ii] Laughter is far more and far less than Butler’s excitable speech.[iii]
Left hand cuffed six times but the ink still drips. State violence. Zunar’s economy of line, state lies, state hysteria, detention, accusations, impending imprisonment for the poetics of the brush held quietly, at first, in the notebooks Zunar carries. Books whose effulgence and biting satire the state cannot take. Humour which frees the body, the mind, the soul. Survival. State off.
Sedition Act where all the nationalistic aspirations of the flag are but a prison. Ripples of iron which merely torture those for whom the imagination can terrify.
[i] Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London: Routledge, 2016), p.123.
[ii] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: S.I.Allen, 1911).
[iii] Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A politics of the performative (London: Routledge, 1997).