Laughter comes in many forms. There’s mad or diabolical laughter, black humor, laughing till we cry, shaking with laughter, and so on. Kant described it as “the affect that agitates the intestines and the diaphragm.” A non-verbal expression of the body, laughter is a topic that has challenged philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Helmuth Plessner to Hans Blumenberg.
Speaker Rolf-Peter Janz is professor emeritus in the German Department of Freie Universität Berlin. His publications include the following books: Autonomie und soziale Funktion der Kunst: Studien zur Ästhetik von Schiller und Novalis (Stuttgart, 1973); Arthur Schnitzler: Zur Diagnose des Wiener Bürgertums im Fin de Siècle (Stuttgart, 1977) [with Klaus Laermann]; Friedrich Schiller: Theoretische Schriften (Frankfurt, 1992), Faszination und Schrecken des Fremden (Frankfurt, 2000), Schwindelerfahrungen: Zur kulturhistorischen Diagnose eines vieldeutigen Phänomens, ed. R.-P. Janz et al. (Amsterdam, New York, 2003), Labyrinth und Spiel: Umdeutungen eines Mythos, ed. Hans Richard Brittnacher, R.-P. Janz (Göttingen, 2007), as well as numerous articles on Goethe, Kleist, Kafka, W. Benjamin, and others.
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