“And you will call him he laughs”

Bergson, Freud and the archaeology of jewish humor

Abstract

Our research presents the relations between the question of laughter and the comicity in Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud from the perspective of the connection of the work of both with the notion of "Jewish humor". The problem is set in a double articulation. First, from a perspective in cultural anthropology, we highlight the difficulties posed by the question about the existence and origin of a "Jewish humor". Then, through the philosophical archaeology proposed by Giorgio Agamben in the line of Michel Foucault, we will read the foundational myth of Judaism as a set of statements, a paradigm, a signature in this anthropology of laughter that is constituted in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Keywords: Bergson. Freud. Psychoanalysis. Laughter. Philosophical archaeology.