Tragic Laughter: Why Philosophy Is a Joke | Julie Reshe

Tragic Laughter: Why Philosophy Is a Joke
The most honest philosophy mocks itself. It begins with questions that cannot be answered, seeks clarity only to collapse into paradox, and reaches for truth while knowing it will fail. It is not a solemn pursuit of wisdom but a practice of disappearance, of undoing the self, of standing in the ruins of meaning. If it doesn’t simultaneously hurt you and make you laugh—it’s not philosophy. This talk proposes that the philosopher is a failed comic—not funny enough to be a proper comedian, yet too aware of its own failure to be taken as a sage. With help from existentialism, pessimism, and negative psychoanalysis, we’ll explore how philosophy becomes tragic through the comic—how laughter is its most honest form of despair.


The Speaker
Julie Reshe is a Ukraine-born philosopher, author of a negative psychoanalytic approach, and Visiting Lecturer at University College Cork and Visiting Professor at University College Dublin. She is also the Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Her recent books include Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (Palgrave, 2023) and Death and Love: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2025).

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