Can we nonetheless chortle naively? René Girard’s unpublished reply | EUROtoday

“R will go well that will laugh the last, ”repeats popular wisdom. Provided you end up laughing at yourself, warned the young René Girard in a short test written around his thirtieth year. The master of this reintegration of the grotesque body of the laughable individual in a joyful communion devoid of wickedness is Molière. Actor and comic author struck with hypocondriac melancholy, he passed out on the scene of the theater of the Palais-Royal by interpreting the role of Argan in The imaginary patient, Before dying a few hours later.

Who is laughing? What are we laughing at? Why can we chortle? To perceive the artwork of farce, massive or small, the processes of its manufacture and the ulterior motives of a laughing society, it’s futile to query the order of priority of …