TY  - CHAP
A1  - Burton, James
T1  - The animal that laughs at itself : false false alarms about the end of 'Man'
T2  - Errans : going astray, being adrift, coming to nothing / ed. by Christoph F.E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer ; Cultural Inquiry ; 24
N2  - A trio of themes recur across prominent Western theories of laughter: violence, the human/nonhuman, and error. The paper traces this trio through a series of frequently cited paradigms for understanding laughter, including superiority, incongruity and relief theories, Henri Bergson's theory of laughter and V. S. Ramachandran's false alarm theory; and argues that it reflects a shared, if partially submerged concern with the instability and demise of a particular figure of the human, one that is circumscribed by the culturally specific (if globally influential) values of Eurocentric/Western thought, largely corresponding to Sylvia Wynter's 'Man'. This suggests that laughter has an ambiguous immanent potential for both undermining and/or reasserting, de- and/or restabilising the illusion of Man's universalizing drive to identify itself with the human per se.
KW  - Lachen
KW  - Humor
KW  - Theorie
KW  - Westliche Welt
KW  - Laughter
KW  - Humour
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/70474
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-704741
UR  - https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-24/burton_the-animal-that-laughs-at-itself.pdf
SN  - 978-3-96558-037-4
SN  - 978-3-96558-038-1
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 50
EP  - 74
PB  - ICI Press
CY  - Berlin
ER  -