Bataille’s Laughter: Comedy, Irony, or Wonder? Examining Ecstasy as an Anthropocentric Limit

This article applies a reading of Georges Bataille’s Laughter of Death to the comedic, the ironic, and the wonderful, to determine whether these functions are amenable to the dissolution of subjectivity that his laughter implies. This dissolution, in turn, repositions humans within an ecology of death identified as the food chain. Bataille’s laughter thus serves as a litmus test for the extent to which these functions – representing humanism (the wonderful), postmodernism (the comedic), and posthumanism (the ironic) – rely on identity and, consequently, anthropocentricity.