On Marriage

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Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and at the Graduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana). She is the author of numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis and philosophy, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex?

Marriage may not be for everyone, but, as a currently married person, I’ve been trying to make it suit me. That doesn’t mean I’ve found it easy (I haven’t), although I have found it gets easier over time. Still, I do occasionally wonder if it is marriage’s very success as an institution that has proven injurious to the lived experience of so many marriages. For if the norms marriage has helped to reproduce have been particularly pernicious for single people, they have not been too kind to couples either. As any psychoanalyst could tell you, when it comes to relationships, the invocation of the ideal tends to summon its own shadow. This is no less true of the spousal relation than it is of the parental one, where the ideal that none of us can live up to has the effect, very often, of inspiring cruel and abusive behaviour under that idealised cover. Since their first book, Why Are Animals Funny? (2013), Everyday Analysis has tried to take the political and philosophical side of comedy deadly seriously. On this panel, Alfie Bown, Dan Bristow, Isabel Millar, Ben Moore, and James Smith will discuss the place of comedy in our politically polarised culture today: from the use of irony and comedy memes by the alt right, the emerging cottage industry of satires against ‘social justice’ politics, and the funniest president ever, to the question of ‘radical comedy’ as – Alenka Zupančič theorises it – for the left today.

Discussions and talks from the Free Thinking Festival 2019

DB. That was the most anti-comic moment in the panel. All I had was fear. I had nothing else. That’s basically the root of everything for me. I don’t think that’s unusual. What I do think is unusual is that it’s become a subject for you. Why do you think that for you marriage is something to think about, talk about and make work about? But Baum also used the editing process to “remove things that were too specific to us and to include things other people could relate to”. This is what makes the film, in her view, “not just a confessional thing but a contribution to a research culture, for people who are questioning and exploring”. She hopes that it will feed into wider academic debates about “the effect of leaving pregnancy until later in life, the effect of new reproductive technologies on pregnancy. It’s equally interested in male domestic life, and in people trying to do a very old-fashioned thing – [conduct a] heterosexual marriage – in a world where it doesn’t mean what it used to.”

DS. — they’ve been given a platform. But there’s another way of saying it, and if we weren’t such liberal lefties, we would say: they know how to be funny, how to use being funny to progress their agenda. That’s where we might be left behind by the right. I felt totally alienated from her until the moment when the ritual of getting married under the canopy was over. After that in the blink of an eye it was the best day of my life and she was the greatest person in the world and I was free. I think I needed to literally tie the knot to break out of my cynicism.James A. Smith teaches literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Samuel Richardson and the Theory of Tragedy (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism (Zer0, 2019).