#lydia amir
Lydia Amir
Taking Ridicule Seriously
The Legacy of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Laughter
Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset(2021)Each of the three chapters focuses on the significance of humor and laughter in the good life as advocated by Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset. These chapters also explore the complex relationship between the comic and the tragic, and of humor and laughter to irony, satire, and ridicule. The Legacy of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Laughter makes an invaluable contribution to recent interpretive work done on Bataille and Deleuze, and offers further introduction to the relatively understudied Rosset. It illuminates the philosophies of these three thinkers, their connection to Nietzsche, and, overall, the significant role that humor plays in philosophy.
If human life is a tragedy, what would redeem it or make it more livable? Lydia Amir, in “Philosophy, Humor, and the Human Condition: Taking Ridicule Seriously,” (2019) says that the easy answer is getting what we want, but human life lived as a tragedy is to know that one can never have it all.
Ridicule, the solution to human condition?
Her perspective is that self-referential humor that encourages one to see themselves as incongruous (serious/foolish, important/unimportant, grounded/unmoored) primes humans to see their own ridiculousness; seeing oneself as ridiculous allows one to move past the tragic condition and fulfill their desires in life.
Lydia Amir is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, USA. She is the author of Humor and the Good Life: Shaftesbury, Hamann, Kierkegaard (2014), and Rethinking Philosophers’ Responsibility (2017). She is the Founding-President of the International Association for the Philosophy of Humor
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/humor-2021-0070/html?lang=en
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