Laughter: An Interview with Michel Onfray * Interviewed by Vincent Citot for Le Philosophoire Michel Onfray is the author of a considerable oeuvre, original and engaged, which attempts, beginning with an enlightened reading of Nietzsche, to revive the hedonist tradition which was born in Cyrene in ancient Greece and has since been forgotten or neglected. Defender of a “philosophical hedonism”, Onfray tries to think the entire philosophical field in light of this project: on the moral plane in La Sculpture de Soi (1993); on the political plane in La Politique Rebelle (1997); he proposes a philosophy of eroticism in Théorie du Corps Amoureux (2000) and a hedonist epistemology in Féeries Anatomiques (2003). Yet he has still not directly confronted the question of laughter, and it is with much pleasure that we have interrogated him on this point. Q. Michel Onfray, I would like to begin with a direct and no doubt voluntarily naive question: is laughter a pleasure? In other words, is a hedonist treatment of laughter possible? As you have still not dedicated an explicit study to laughter, is there a reason for this, or in your opinion could it constitute the object of a future study? M. O. Laughter can be benevolent or malevolent, it can be to the advantage or at the expense of a person, it can help or kill. As such, it is neutral; it is its usages, its utilisations, its users, its intentions, its effects, which allow it be or not to be a pleasure. It is a pleasure when it allows – with friends, relatives, and accomplices – the punctual deconstruction of the real with a flash of wit, with a play on words, puns, vague approximations; it’s a displeasure when one suffers it on behalf of someone who uses it as a deliberately destructive and devastating instrument. Laughter can maintain a relation with humour – mild, polite, courteous, joyous, light – but also with irony – dark, harsh, at times bad intentioned or even cynical and downright aggressive. Measures of the death drive and life drive in situations in which the laugh is at stake determine the answer to your question. I am a nominalist and do not believe in the possibility of speaking of a Laugh in itself, in the absolute, floating in the sky of pure ideas. I have not written a book specifically dedicated to laughter, certainly, yet I have dedicated works to Diogenes the Cynic (Cynismes, 1990) and Aristippus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaics (L’Invention de Plaisir, 2002) which celebrate the philosophical usage of laughter and bring back into fashion, as much as one can do, philosophers who resort to this medium in order to denude our illusions. After them, Nietzsche and Foucault, great laughing philosophers, act in my pantheon in the manner of these two figures who come from a non- canonical Greek tradition. Q. In the “Epilogue” to La Raison Gourmande (1995) you made the distinction between a “vulgar hedonism”, which seeks brute pleasure for itself, a rough and animal pleasure, and a “philosophical hedonism”, which implies a certain spirituality, an “ethical and aesthetic concern”, a “supplement of soul”. On the other hand, you try to restore the body to a central