Black Humor in the Face of Death

• Main Authors: Margot Coppin, Jean-Luc Gaspard
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2017-01-01
• Series: Desde el Jardín de Freud
• Subjects: angustia; humor negro; función subjetiva; muerte; psicopatología; cuidados paliativos
• Online Access: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/jardin/article/view/65522

Dying subjects that resort to humor, whom we shall call "humorants", question themselves and especially us. How could they possibly allow themselves such an outrage at this precise moment of their existence?  When they do so, it is through the particular and rather crude form of black humor. On the basis of Freud's and Lacan's contributions regarding the question of death and of the clinical exercise of palliative care, the article addresses the expression of a linguistic jouissance on the part of subjects who are on the way to that which will forever calm their drives - the place in which the joint influence of capitalist and scientific discourse make it possible to affirm the accidental nature of death in our modern world. In this sense, "humorants" seem to be responding to the anxious perplexity of many dying patients when confronted by the traumatic real.