CARTOON-O-PHOBIA Whose flaming ink burns. For passion, for laughter, for acuity.
Laughter: etymology Old English hlaehahan, onomatopoeic in tone (almost). Rire in all its ambiguity — and how Joyce made Derrida laugh.
Does laughter invite aphorism, whether verbal or visual? Laughter’s flight, its vision: Ulysses, Dionysus, and more.
‘We should consider every truth false unless it is accompanied by at least one laugh’ — Nietzsche.
To laugh is, as Kluge and Negt suggest, to raise the diaphragm.[i]Those laughs which draw from deep within the body – their gymnastics and their silence. Laughter, then, as catharsis — the modus operandi for venturing into the public sphere. What this public sphere might be is not easy to determine: sedition, censorship, the sly violence of images, …? The public, laughing — is this more than the raucous, the noise of the crowd? And what does it mean for an image to laugh? Not the smile nor the pragmatism of Bergson, who argues for a certain vitalism – how the body explodes in laughter.[ii] Laughter is far more and far less than Butler’s excitable speech.[iii]
Left hand cuffed six times but the ink still drips. State violence. Zunar’s economy of line, state lies, state hysteria, detention, accusations, impending imprisonment for the poetics of the brush held quietly, at first, in the notebooks Zunar carries. Books whose effulgence and biting satire the state cannot take. Humour which frees the body, the mind, the soul. Survival. State off.
Sedition Act where all the nationalistic aspirations of the flag are but a prison. Ripples of iron which merely torture those for whom the imagination can terrify.
[i] Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London: Routledge, 2016), p.123.
[ii] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: S.I.Allen, 1911).
[iii] Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A politics of the performative (London: Routledge, 1997).
Natasha Eaton is Reader in the History of Art, UCL. She is author of Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia: Vertiginous exchange, (London: Routledge, 2020) and is an Editor of Third Text.
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Zunar: Laughter as a political tool
a context by Alice Rudge
How can laughter be used as a tool to challenge existing political structures? This is a question that Zunar addresses through his cartoons, in which he has challenged and exposed corruption and abuses of power by the government in his home country of Malaysia. His art is a form of resistance. It has caused him to be attacked, arrested, detained, and investigated under the Sedition Act and the Penal Code for doing so. Five of his cartoon books have been banned by the Malaysian government on the grounds that the contents are ‘detrimental to public order’. His office in Kuala Lumpur has been raided, and thousands of cartoon books confiscated. Printers, vendors, and booksellers have been harassed. Zunar is the only Malaysian selected by Amnesty International for their biggest annual international campaign, ‘Write for Rights (#W4R) 2015′. He holds that when one’s country is facing a moral crisis and beset by corruption, abuse of power and violations of human rights, then it is one’s duty to take a firm stand against those responsible for it. As a cartoonist, Zunar feels compelled to show this stand in his work. Drawing cartoons, to him, becomes a fight for justice.
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