“The comic is the only possible mode of conceiving of the law, in a peculiar combination of irony and humor.” – Gilles Deleuze

The title of this seminar alludes to Gilles Deleuze’s small book, Coldness and Cruelty, in which he provocatively approaches the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold Sacher-Masoch as the work of an ironist and a humorist respectively. Irony and humor are two ways of creating distance, of disidentifying the subject from the immediacy of affect, of feeling, and separating form from content. Irony and humor, like sadism and masochism, are two ways of relating to the law and to the constraint that the law imposes upon the desiring subject. Taking Deleuze’s book as a point of departure to explore the ironic and the humorous, in this seminar we have occasion not only to read Deleuze but engage his sources which range from Plato to Freud, from Kant to Lacan.