The animal that laughs at itself : false false alarms about the end of 'Man'
- 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.
Author: | James BurtonORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-704741 |
URL: | https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-24/burton_the-animal-that-laughs-at-itself.pdf |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24_2 |
ISBN: | 978-3-96558-037-4 |
ISBN: | 978-3-96558-038-1 |
ISSN: | 2627-731X |
Parent Title (English): | Errans : going astray, being adrift, coming to nothing / ed. by Christoph F.E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer ; Cultural Inquiry ; 24 |
Publisher: | ICI Press |
Place of publication: | Berlin |
Document Type: | Part of a Book |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2022/10/06 |
Year of first Publication: | 2021 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2022/10/21 |
Tag: | Humour; Laughter |
GND Keyword: | Lachen; Humor; Theorie; Westliche Welt |
Page Number: | 26 |
First Page: | 50 |
Last Page: | 74 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 508105781 |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik | |
Sammlungen: | CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft |
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International |