The tyranny of laughter

What do you do, in politics, when you "put the laughers on your side"? Starting with a study of Mattano's Siennese short story by the pseudo-Gentile Sermini(Novelle, XXV), and drawing on the work of Odile Redon and Lauro Martines in particular, the lecture attempts to define the narrative and social mechanisms of the beffa , and to produce a global interpretation of this capacity of satirical literature to "sell the fuse" (Pierre Bourdieu) on the implicit rules of the social game. If medieval forms of distinction are placed here on the edge of fiction, its sociological analysis is so transparent that it is paradoxically put at fault. The short story certainly acts as a wake-up call to the upstart whose folly was to believe in the truth of what institutions said about themselves - and in particular in the political frescoes in Siena's Palazzo pubblico . The laughter of social retribution that ensues reveals the unequal social distribution of ontological fragility. This is the lesson of this political hullabaloo: the paradoxical subversive impact of this short story is to show that to reverse is not to overthrow.

Contents

• "Putting the laughter on one's side: a political art
• Hostile or obscene, Freud's witticisms that wound or expose
• Political anthropology of the barzelletta (Martin Rueff, "Berlusconism, Caesarism and Political Language")
• When politics makes a spectacle of itself, showing it is not making it seen
• Before the age of representation, the tyranny of thehabitus
• "Once upon a time in Siena there was a young man from the contado, named Mattano, son of a rich villain, who had been enrolled for several years in the art of the grocers; and no longer feeling himself, he believed himself to have arrived at the height of the other citizens" (Pseudo Gentile Sermini, Novelle, ed. Monica Marchi, XXV)
• Authorial erasure and intertextuality
• For historian, translator and passeuse Odile Redon (translation of Mattano's novella in L'espace d'une cité. Sienne et le pays siennois (^XIIIe-XIVe siècles), Rome, EFR, 1994, p. 127-132)
• From medieval forms of distinction to the edges of fiction: the chain of necessities
• "When the villain leaves the contado and comes to live in town, no sooner has he put on a colored cloak, with shoes with good soles, than he begins to puff himself up, taking himself for one of the great [...]. Whoever brings him to his senses would certainly not sin against the Holy Spirit": the short story as a wake-up call for the upstart
• Mattano, or the tyranny of the proper name
• A political dream: the folly of believing what institutions say about themselves to be true
• "When an epidemic came to town, he decided to flee it. On learning that Abbadia a Isola was well, since ten young Siennese had taken refuge there..." the story is a trap, the island is a snare
• "As they were all good young men, they were unable to free themselves from him": Mattano, or the impossibility of being the eleventh man in the brigata spendericcia
• Order through noise: the beffa and the "laughter of social punishment" (Lauro Martines)
• Biological life, biographical life and ontological fragility
• A political hullabaloo: when the whole town is in cahoots to disguise the disguise
• Taking the impostor at his word: is Giannino di Guccio a Sienese woolgrower or a French king? (Tomaso di Carpegna Falconieri, L'homme qui se prendait pour le roi de France, 2018)
• To reverse is not to overthrow: the paradoxical subversive reach of political fiction
• "What do you think the other subjects - who wish to be led by men of importance - would think when they saw Mattano sitting in the lordship? They surely wouldn't be happy to find themselves under such a government, and they'd all want to do as well as him or better."
• Maintenance, eloquence and nourishment, "three ways of distinguishing oneself" (Pierre Bourdieu)
• "Dame Raison visits the cook Dalfino in a dream", "In conclusion, on her behalf, I tell you that you will never sit in a palace as sacred as this one"
• L'issue carnavalesque, Mattano "pape des Sots et prieur des Meuglons"
• Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Rabelaisian inversion of the Dantesque world
• Verticality of the world fable, horizontality of European politics (Karlheinz Stierle, Francesco Petrarca, ein Intellektueller Im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2003)
• Waiting for Godot, "all the dead voices