19th Series of Humor

Humor appears a way to bring language down from the heights of ideas and up from the depths of bodies to the expression of sense at the surface. Objects and events communicate in the void which constitutes their substance. The Stoics conceived of the void as having extra-being and insistence. The void = the nonsense at the surface, the paradoxical element, the aleatory point. Humor = the co-extensiveness of nonsense with sense. Humor seems how nonsense can make a donation of sense. To get to the pure expression of sense one tries to abolish language and thought. Deleuze connects the Stoics with Zen Buddhists. The balance of form and emptiness. They both give blows on their staff. The way Deleuze puts it, this makes a pun on a music staff, the way music gets noted and designated. Music, like humor, can bring us to the surface. Not said in the video: "To the question 'Who is speaking?', we answer sometimes with the individual, sometimes with the person, and sometimes with the ground that dissolves them both. 'The self of the lyric poet raises its voice from the bottom of the abyss of being, its subjectivity is pure imagination.'" - The Logic of Sense p. 140. The last quote is from Nietzsche.