Radical Revelations: A Review of Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy
“Laughter shakes us out of our deadness,” Nuar Alsadir declares in her new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation. Alsadir, an award-winning poet and psychoanalyst, weaves her personal experiences into critical interventions of texts like the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Anna Karenina, and Donald Trump’s tweets to argue that laughter is a radical act of self-revelation, a means of exposing the self. Conversations with her daughters and vulnerable moments in a two-week clown workshop become grounds for Alsadir to consider how laughter can revive and unmask us.
When we laugh, we reveal the True Self that Alsadir claims we all have. The True Self, she explains, is “the deepest core of our being, the part of us that feels ‘alive’ and ‘real.’” Surrounding that core is a protective layer Alsadir calls the False Self, which we “put forward in accordance with the codes and expectations of others.” But even though the False Self guards our “deepest core,” it can also prevent us from connecting with the True Self it protects. Alsadir writes, “A False Self that is so fortified by layers of compliant behavior that it loses contact with the raw impulses and expressions that characterize the True Self often results in a person feeling as though they don’t really know who they are... When contact is made with the True Self, however, wires touch, switching on an inner light.” We generate this kind of light when we laugh.
According to Alsadir, there are two kinds of laughter. The first, Duchenne laughter, is named for the nineteenth-century neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne: it is a spontaneous eruption of joy from the depths of our bodies. Alsadir describes Duchenne laughter as “fall[ing] through a nasty hole into a vortex of laughter, excitement, or nakedness” where we “take obscene pleasure in our corporeality” and “strip down to a primal, unstylized state.” Embodied laughter exposes the self because it is honest, authentic, and bursts forth organically from within us.
Its opposite, non-Duchenne laughter, is cerebral and calculated. “Whereas Duchenne laughter inadvertently expresses one’s state of mind,” Alasadir writes, “non-Duchenne laughter is used to conceal or mask it.” We use non-Duchenne laughter, which is “not expressive but imitates emotional expression” and “feigns the joy associated with genuine laughter, to influence other people.” When we laugh because we feel uncomfortable, for example, or want to make someone else feel less uncomfortable, we deploy non-Duchenne laughter. Laughter can be authentic or deceitful. The former exposes who we are beneath our social skin: the latter conceals us.
Laughter is radical, especially for women. In Anna Karenina, a text Alsadir returns to frequently throughout Animal Joy, Tolstoy’s tragic heroine stands out because she has bright eyes and a willing laugh. Anna dazzles the people around her—she is full of the light we make when we connect with the vibrant self at our cores. But Anna’s laughter marks her, too, as the fallen woman she will become by the novel’s end. Alsadir cites the twentieth-century psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, who wrote that “‘the mouth opened for laughing’ was... seen as vulgar, suggestive, ‘in the service of homosexual and feminine instinctual tendencies,’” and “‘used to seduce... in a feminine way.’” Laughter exposes: open-mouthed, we show ourselves. Even as, according to Kris, laughter is feminine, it pushes beyond the feminine in excessiveness.
Reading Alsadir’s analysis of Anna Karenina reminded me of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which draws an explicit connection between laughter and madness. Feminist critic Elaine Showalter argued that madness is a female malady because it has long been associated with feminine traits: a woman’s body and emotions are simultaneously the precursor and proof of her madness. Like laughter, madness is the excess of femininity. In Jane Eyre, Brontë’s heroine is first alerted to the presence of Mr. Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha Mason, when she hears Bertha’s laughter echoing down the halls of Thornfield.
Exposing the self in writing—as Anna and Bertha do in laughing—is also radical. Animal Joy is a new work of autotheory, a creative form that blends theory and autobiography. This form arises from the feminist critical tradition: in the mid-twentieth century, a few feminist scholars used an “I” narrator to incorporate personal experiences into their academic writing. When they did, they pushed back against an academic culture that privileged objectivity and disembodiment—and, by extension, the white, cis, straight, and masculine—in scholarly research, insisting that intellectual labor happens in the body and arises from personal experience.
Though feminist critics have written their lives in conversation with theory for decades, autotheory is a relatively new term for that technique. The term gained traction in 2015 when Maggie Nelson called her book The Argonauts “autotheory,” crediting Paul B. Preciado for the term. Autotheory encompasses texts that blend the personal and theoretical in a variety of ways: for example, in The Argonauts, Nelson uses theory to illuminate her personal experiences; in Animal Joy, Alsadir uses personal experience to illustrate theoretical concepts. Alsadir joins a cadre of women writers who weave their lives into their intellectual work.
Alsadir’s choice to craft Animal Joy as a work of autotheory is significant, given that her book explores how laughter reveals the self. Alsadir grounds rigorous engagement with Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida in conversations with her daughters and meditations on the experience of motherhood. Because she writes herself into it, Alsadir’s theoretical work is inherently self-revelatory, just like laughter. Using personal experiences to develop and illustrate her arguments, Alsadir eschews the illusion of the disembodied, objective self that so often characterizes theoretical writing. She exposes herself on the page.
Autotheory empowers women to articulate the embodied experience of inquiry. Reading Animal Joy, I was reminded of Dorieann Ní Ghríofa’s 2020 translation memoir, A Ghost in the Throat, in which the narrator researches eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill while pumping breastmilk at the kitchen table. Ní Ghríofa’s narrator performs intellectual labor to the whir and hum of the pump. Similarly, in Animal Joy, Alsadir undertakes hefty theoretical discussions of politics and media culture while parenting and being present for her daughters. Each facet of Alsadir’s life inspires and requires theory: conversations at bedtime and in the kitchen become the impetus for her psychoanalytical work. Animal Joy makes visible the simultaneity of motherhood and scholarship and insists that women’s bodies are essential to intellectual life.
Animal Joy is organized associatively, evoking the sensation of being embodied by mirroring the mind’s movements. Associative movement is also fundamental to psychoanalysis—it reveals to the analyst what’s most important about her analysand. “The work of psychoanalysis,” Alsadir explains, “is to extract the meaning [that] can be accessed only indirectly... in the form of dreams, parapraxes, superstitions, random thoughts, or associations.” Associations offer a glimpse of what lies beneath: the True Self.
Laughter, like association, is spontaneous and revelatory. It pulls back the protective layers that guard our inner light, “the deepest core of our being.” In this cultural and political moment when the bodily autonomy of people who can become pregnant is under threat, laughter as an act of self-revelation is especially vital. Animal Joy models how women can assert our presence in a world that would have us keep our mouths shut. We protest by leaning into our bodies and laughing—not in the social way we have been conditioned to, but authentically—that Duchenne, obscene, side-splitting laughter Alsadir describes. When we laugh like this, we might be heard.
Nuar Alsadir, a poet and psychoanalyst, is the author of Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.
Morgan Graham is an English PhD student at the University of Minnesota. She is Managing Editor at Pleiades and has published work in Chicago Review of Books, Colorado Review, Great River Review, The Evansville Review, and Salt Hill Journal. Find her at morgandianegraham.wordpress.com and @morgraha on Twitter.