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emerge.
HUMOUR AND IRONY 139
Satire recognises the lowly animal being behind all our ideas of self-
creation. Satire is immanently historical; looking at the ways in which
ideas of man have been produced from the flow of life. By contrast,
irony is transcendental; any history of ourselves must be narrated by
some historicising subject. Irony presents the subject as the absent
ground that allows us to think of or represent any nature or history;
satire shows that such a presupposed ground is merely a way of
disguising or denying the conflicting forces that produce us. Satire shows
the ways in which we do not author ourselves, through the presentation
of puns, humour, hypocrisy and stupidity.
We can explore the question of just how we read a text whether
ironically or satirically by looking at literary history and literary
character. According to Deleuze and Guattari s history of the subject in
Anti-Oedipus (1983), life begins with inhuman and pre-personal
perception interacting flows of genetic, biological and animate
material which form organisms, including human and animal bodies.
Humans gradually perceive other bodies and form groups or territories
by collective perception. A tribe, for example, is formed as an identifiable
territory when it creates common marks through tattooing, painting,
scarring across its social body. These marks are not signifiers; they do
not represent a common whole or shared meaning. The whole is formed
or collected only through the rituals of marking. An assemblage is
created through collective perception; each body perceives the other
perceiving body as similarly marked, and as also perceiving and sharing
this process of marking. An assemblage is a collection of bodies that
creates its own connections through difference by producing or
creating marks on otherwise radically different bodies. An assemblage
is not a collection of bodies grounded on a notion of prior sameness.
Some idea of man can only be formed if an even greater assemblage
of bodies recognises some common body as its organising image. The
body of white, speaking, bourgeois man, for example, acts as the
perceived image that identifies the whole. A body is no longer perceived
as like one s own because it is marked out or rendered common through
a perceivable inscription. Rather, one imagines that one can see and relate
to others because deep down we are all human. Western history moves
from the organisation of body parts and desires tribes that collect
around specific markings to some concept of man in general. Instead
of viewing bodies as collections of parts, desires and fluxes of singular
or non-generalisable differences, one sees the body as the sign of some
140 HUMOUR AND IRONY
underlying and general humanity. We imagine some identity, some
human nature, which provides a timeless, contextless and necessary
ground. The political, or the creation of collectives, is no longer active,
with different bodies gathering through some event and forming a
notion of the human. The political is passive; we speak and act together
because we are human.
According to Deleuze and Guattari political wholes and social
identity are produced from desire and investments (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983). It is the display of an external body such as the body of
the torturing despot, or the forgiving king that creates the social body.
The collective is produced when desires of bodies act in relation to an
other body, seen by all, and seen to be visible by all. The king or despot
that oversees punishment or torture is regarded with fear or terror; it is
this collective perception of a body that organises and constitutes a
political whole. Such an investment becomes more subtle when we all
invest and obey, not the actual body of the king or despot, but the
concept of man or subjectivity; we are gathered around the image of a
speaking, reasoning, disembodied soul of common sense. Irony, too, can
be related both to this production of terror and the enjoyment of cruelty.
Irony produces a viewpoint that surveys the whole, that derides or
chastens everyday life and desire. Further, the enjoyment of this high
urbanity could not proceed without the powerlessness, blindness or
exclusion of those who are ironised. Irony is only possible with the idea
of a subject who views life and its differences from on high, a subject
with the power to be other than the struggle of bodily existence.
What Deleuze and Guattari s history of the subject in Anti-Oedipus
sets out to demonstrate is that this elevated disembodied subject has
emerged from a process of cruelty and terror. It is only with the
organised torture of bodies that one can imagine a law to which such
bodies are subjected. The subject is an effect of terror, for it is only
through terror that we produce a law to which we are all subjected, and
the idea of a universal and dutiful we .
Literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, can reverse this
historical and ironic tendency by re-living the cruelty and terror from
which the law is imagined. Kafka is often read as an ironic or negative
author because the law always remains beyond any image or figure of
the law all we encounter are judgements and prohibitions, never the
law itself (Derrida 1989b). Deleuze, however, sees Kafka as anything
but negative and ironic. Kafka s fathers and judges in The Castle (1922)
HUMOUR AND IRONY 141
or The Trial (1925) are not signs of a hidden law. Rather, the weak but
punishing father is imagined as that which stands in front of a law
forever out of reach. Our subjection to law is an effect of irony. Because
all we have are partial images, we imagine some law above and beyond
our own life. Kafka exposes the law as a fiction, as nothing more than a
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