LAUGHING AND ALTERITIES. ON THE MOVEMENT OF ALTERITY IN THE PHILOSOPHIES OF LAUGHTER

A laughing is an event of alteration. Without alteration laughter wouldn’t be possible. This paper aims at describing laughter and alterity as intertwined phenomena. Therefore it investigates five different dimensions of alterity within the phenomenon of laughter. The source material for this study is provided by a series of monographs about laughter which were published during the 20th century: beginning with Henri Bergson’s Laughter, followed by Helmuth Plessner’s Laughing and Crying, Hans Blumenberg’s The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting and finally by Peter L. Berger’s Redeeming Laughter. By describing the social, corporal, historical, phenomenal and redeeming alterations of laughing a new performative ethical perspective on the phenomenon of laughter will be shown.