Humour, Irony, and Perversion: On Deleuze's Political Ethics

This chapter examines Deleuze’s discussions of perversion and humour, particularly as they are articulated in relation to irony and particularly as they appear in Deleuze’s book on Sacher-Masoch and his essay on Michel Tournier’s Friday, a revised version of which is appended to The Logic of Sense. These discussions may seem to be primarily ethical, and Deleuze does link humour and perversion to what he calls the “ethics of intensive quantities” that he outlines in Difference and Repetition. However, there are also explicit connections to politics, particularly in the way the discussions in Deleuze’s study of Masoch are constructed around questions concerning the law and contract. In this regard, humour and perversion are part of what Foucault would call an ethics that feeds into politics – that is, a political ethics. The overall aim of this chapter is to show why humour is for Deleuze fundamentally a more subversive (politically and otherwise) than irony and other forms of critique. I relate this idea to Nietzsche’s proclamation in The Genealogy of Morals that the greatest threat to the ascetic ideal and its will to truth today are the “comedians” who can arouse mistrust of them, and to a 2010 interview with American television host and comedian Jon Stewart where he explains what he sees as the political role of humour.