Asking for It: An Exchange between Cassandra Seltman and Vanessa Place

In this performative exchange, psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman and attorney/artist Vanessa Place enact the classic comedy double act, playing straight man and comic to confound not just the idea of a proper response, but the impossibility of a proper question. Executed in the form of a quasi-academic dialogue, the two circle the concept of comedy as performance in the inevitability of performance as inherently comic. The interview is a consultation between two professions bound to a code of ethics and toward an imaginary telos, with an unruly cartoonish third—“getting” both the law and its joke. If the artist’s performance is a mimesis without a truth, the analyst’s performance is that the truth is mimetic. The point is never to clarify or resolve, but to keep the ongoing contronymic appointment.