The unconscious politics of humor: Lacan, Rancière, and humorous disruption

Abstract Contemporary scholarship in humor studies has increasingly sought to measure and account for humor’s political function. However, the explanatory power of such research is limited by inherited theoretical frameworks that say little about the social and psychological mechanisms through which humor acquires its political dimensions. This study addresses this theoretical lacuna by synthesizing psychoanalytic and political philosophical traditions to offer a novel account of the structural processes that underpin humor’s political capacity. Specifically, this investigation integrates Jacques Lacan’s tripartite psychoanalytic framework – comprising the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real – with Jacques Rancière’s theoretical concept of dissensus as the basis for an analytical apparatus to explicate humor’s political efficacy. The proposed theoretical synthesis positions humor as a force that operates simultaneously across psychic and social registers and which enacts its political function through dual processes of disruption and reconfiguration. This theoretical framework contributes to scholarly discourse at the nexus of psychoanalysis, political theory, and cultural studies, while elucidating the complex, dialectical relationship between unconscious processes and the constitution of political agency.