Abject Metamorphosis and Mirthless Laughter: On Human-to-Animal Transitions and the 'Disease of Being Finite'

In On Humour, Simon Critchley suggests that ‘when the human becomes animal the effect is disgusting and if we laugh at all then it is what Beckett calls the “mirthless laugh”’ (Critchley 2002:33). In this article, I take seriously Critchley's suggestion that human-to-animal transitions are disgusting, and I seek to critically examine the nature of this disgust and its interplay with this ‘mirthless laughter’. I suggest that there are two fundamental aspects to this phenomenon that need to be disentangled. The first aspect relates to what John Limon (2000) calls the ‘not quite alienable’ aspects of ourselves – feces, urine, corpses, etc. – that social propriety demands that we hide, which can be understood in terms of Kristeva's account of the abject. (Kristeva 1982) The second aspect, I will argue, is the way in which human-animal metamorphoses act as a metaphor for disease. Drawing on Havi Carel's reading of The Fly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1986) to make this argument, I suggest that what one finds in both The Fly and Kafka's Metamorphosis (2000 [1915]) is a disease-like transition in which the protagonists find themselves in a position of fundamental incongruity. They remain ontologically humanlike whilst becoming factically limited by both the physical changes to their body and their social abjection. Importantly, I suggest that this experience of illness and impairment grounds the sort of ‘mirthless’ humour that Critchley identifies. In doing so I will draw out more explicitly Critchley's connection between this type of humour and the tragicomic experience of the impaired characters in Beckett's Endgame (2002 [1957]).