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.
Download full text files
Additional Services
| Author: | James BurtonORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| 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 |
