| Chapter 1: | Uproarious Prologue |
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In summary, laughing and crying are human beings’ boundary situations in the perpetual mediation of having and being a body:
Plessner’s careful attention to experienced detail and the structural expression of his thought identify some reasons for salience of imagery considered in religious contexts in China. In part the symbolism has been attracted to elements of explosive splitting, evident in both bodies of material, because phenomena of laughter are well captured by it.
Laughter’s intersections with “religion” occasion intensification of eccentric positionality of the human life-form. Not only conceptual properties, such as ambiguity and creative combination of features in the target symbolism of situations prompting humor, but also the experience of laughter itself are involved in heightening religious awareness during their ritual deployment. Distancing from oneself, discussed by Plessner, as well as odd experiences of automatism taking over and filling in unanswerable distances from one’s world position are qualities deepening religious involvement, elicited in shamanism or ritual. One laughs, giving voice to something beyond oneself.
The interest is not only in laughter. Plessner’s way of analyzing human life’s eccentric features applies as well to all kinds of doubledness in social interaction: acting, irony, perfunctoriness, face performing, and