Description
This interdisciplinary webinar focuses on humour that confronts our own media habits, dependence on technology and the wider cultural imaginary surrounding visions of a Hi-Tech, posthuman future.In Western thought, humour has a long tradition of being regarded an exclusively human phenomenon. Henri Bergson's Le Rire (1900), for instance, introduces the comic as something that "does not exist outside the realm of what is strictly human: "You may laugh at an animal," Bergson notes "but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression" and it also erupts each time "a person gives us the impression of being a thing". The theory Bergson sketches out, thus presents laughter as an automatic bodily corrective that separates the human both from animals and machines, and thereby automatically humanises us from within.
In this session, we turn to the "impossible object of humor" (to cite Simon Critchley), to probe the lines between the human and being an animal body animated by machines, a distinction, as Bergson's theory underlines, that is necessarily ambiguous and fluid. For humour is said to attain its infectious dynamic precisely because our lives habitually stray across these lines - we laugh, because being human is only a precarious part time job, an intermezzo between being animal and functioning absentmindedly like a machine.
| Period | 13 Nov 2020 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Human Worlds 2020 - Being Human as Praxis: Being Human - a festival of the humanities |
| Event type | Other |
| Location | Southampton , United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |