When Herman Melville wrote that he would greet all of life’s surprises with a smile. He was subscribing to a philosophical doctrine that would soon be termed amor fati – an unconditional love of life. Although Moby Dick was published decades before Friedrich Nietzsche popularized the phrase. Melville’s work anticipated and supported the existentialist concept of amor fati by positing. That one ought to embrace all of life’s difficulties while laughing (Leiter 1). This doctrine has, however, been effectively challenged by philosophers. such as Giorgio Agamben, who suggested that some events are so horrid that they must be greeted not with a smile, but with a frown. As Agamben pointedly asked, would one “go to” Auschwitz laughing (Agamben 99)?
In light of this potent philosophical challenge to Melville’s prescription for laughter. I wish to propose a more nuanced outlook on life. In this essay, I will use dancing as a metaphor for a more conditional love of life. While entertaining temporary moments of joy, the philosophical dancer nevertheless recognizes that some experiences are not worth celebrating, and protests those abominations via dances of ridicule or even of rage. Dancing is thus able to capture the joy of laughter while avoiding its blind optimism.
This essay will begin by critically examining the can-can- a joyful dance routine which may be read as a metaphor for the philosophical dancer’s effort to seek out moments of joy. By living the can-can, one looks for beauty and enjoyment in everyday life. In the spirit of the dance routine, one surrounds oneself with friends and high-kicks past obstacles in life. The can-can, then, is the dancer’s answer to laughter; it is a mechanism by which one can generate an attitude of jouissance, or enjoyment. There is an important distinction, however, between the delights of the can-can and the bliss of Melville’s laughter: while the former is an attempt to seek out temporary, contingent instances of joy, the latter is a prescription for optimism in all situations. Moreover, the can-can is only one of the many emotions in the philosophical dancer’s repertoire; because there are a variety of other dances, nowhere is it written that the dancer must always perform the can-can.
In fact, the category of dance also encapsulates a variety of complex and contradictory emotional reactions to situations which definitively do not warrant laughter. One such dance routine is twerking. While a surface-level understanding of twerking might interpret it merely as a form of corporeal pleasure, a closer examination of the routine will reveal the rich history and meaning of twerking. Although twerking originated in African American culture, it has recently been appropriated by white American media. The act of twerking, when performed in particular contexts, can thus be a means of reclaiming black culture; it offers social resistance to white cultural appropriation (Mbakwe 1). In the context of our philosophical discussion, this radical interpretation of twerking symbolizes outrage against social injustice. It reveals how the philosophical dancer can use the metaphor of dance to express rage rather than happiness in scenarios where rage is more appropriate.
While the can-can and twerking are exemplary of the range of emotions that can be expressed by living a life of dance, the world of dance is not limited to these art forms. On the contrary, it would not be inaccurate to say that there are as many dances as there are human emotions. This heterogeneity of the dance tradition further establishes the superiority of dancing over laughing: just as there are countless dances, there are countless situations in which humans can find themselves, and no single reaction is appropriate in all of these predicaments. The diversity of dance traditions, then, reflects the complexity of the human condition far better than Melville’s simple optimism.
