ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Lacan’s reading of Jean Genet’s comedy Le Balcon to which he turned in his 1957–1958 seminar The Formations of the Unconscious. This reading occurs within the context of a discussion of Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as Masquerade”, and Jean Delay’s The Youth of André Gide. The chapter will examine the coincidence of these texts in Lacan’s thought at the time, in light of Alenka Zupančič’s theory of comedy, before offering a reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest by way of example. Drawing on writings by Lorenzo Chiesa, Cristina Aguirre, André Michels, Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre, this chapter traces the dichotomy of truth and appearance as it is deliberately troubled by these comedies.
