Out of Breath: Laughing, Crying at the Body's Limit
We think of laughing and crying as expressions in the same way we think of speaking and gesturing. And yet, both laughing and crying do not express our joy and sorrow in the same way that language does. In both laughing and crying, the body breaks apart, and it shows itself breaking. And because the body belongs to a living context, it is also breaks with a certain way of functioning, departing from a sense of the ordinary. Although laughing and crying are ordinary, they are also extraordinary. In breaking with functional ways of being and instrumental modes of changing reality, they break with the ordinary, but do so within its own terms.This talk will consider the political repercussions of the body as it breaks apart in public, as it breaks with public modes of functioning, and as it breaks open new political potential.
