Reversals of Nothing: The Case of the Sneezing Corpse

Abstract

There exists a strange proximity between the seemingly opposed genres of comedy and the uncanny. In attempting to establish what constitutes their common ground and what distinguishes them, the paper examines the status and the functioning of "nothing" in one and in the other, as well the way "nothing" relates to the question of the real. It puts forward the thesis according to which the uncanny relies on the realism of desire, with its logic of constitutive lack (as transcendent nothing), whereas comedy implies a rather different form of realism, namely the realism of the drive, with its logic of constitutive dislocation (as immanent nothing).