La risa exterminadorael humor trágico en la obra literaria y cinematográfica de Luis Buñuel

Abstract

This thesis, as its title indicates: “Exterminating Laughter. Tragic humour in the literary and cinematographic work of Luis Buñuel”, proposes a tragic philosophical reading of humour, as well as an epistemological approach to laughter, a contingent laughter that destroys without cause or purpose. From his earliest literary writings, Buñuel uses humour as a revelation of the real, that is, an assertion through “joy” of its present, unspeakable, undesirable, and indigestible character. This “humorous” way of sensing the real comes about suddenly in a hazardous moment when the tragic inner experience and the absurd attempt to escape it come together. A mere hint of laughter would exterminate any form of optimism or any illusory belief in a “better” real. First, this study poses a challenge to the ontological status of the real in Buñuel’s literary and cinematographic work as a whole. The refusal of tragic existence provokes the creation of doubles of the real, such as “fleeting impressions”, according to the philosopher Clément Rosset, represented “substantially” by memory and language in the form of mental images which then create either another feeling of the real, imagination, or a disease of the real, illusion, whether it be oracular, metaphysical or psychological...