Laughter As Politics

Patrick Giamario is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of several journal articles and Laughter as Politics will be his first monograph. Giamario is a political theorist with research interests in critical theory, democratic theory, and the history of political thought. His research has been published in Contemporary Political Theory, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Political Research Quarterly, and Angelaki. He is currently working on a new project on the politics of deception.

• Introducing Gelopolitics The Laughing Body Politic: The Counter/sovereign Politics of Hobbes’s Theory of LaughterBeyond A/gelasty: Adorno’s Critical Theory of Laughter Over a Barrel: Ralph Ellison and the Democratic Politics of Black LaughterThe Best Medicine? Re-politicizing Laughter for Contemporary Feminist and Queer Politics The End of Laughter? Gelopolitics and the New Agelasty

Laughter as Politics is an exemplary work of critical political theory. Patrick T. Giamario develops a critique of laughter, which neither denounces nor affirms, but instead shows how laughter is shaped by power and how power is unleashed in laughter, how laughter destabilizes the opposition between logos and phōnē and exposes the limits of liberalism, how laughter upholds a social order and sustains the imagination of something beyond it. Giamario sets aside the question of whether we should be laughing, at our political leaders or their followers, so that he can ask the more difficult question of what we are doing when we laugh and how our laughter shapes and is shaped by politics. His answers, drawing from Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and a number of contemporary feminist and queer theorists, are sophisticated and insightful.