The department is pleased to welcome Professor Emeritus Rolf-Peter Janz, Free University Berlin, for the Fall 2015 Rodig Lecture and Seminar Series.

Laughter comes in many forms. There’s mad or diabolical laughter, black humour, laughing till we cry, shaking
with laughter, and so on. Kant describes it as “the affect that agitates the intestines and the diaphragm.” A
non-verbal expression of the body, laughter is a topic that has challenged philosophers from Aristotle to
Nietzsche, Helmuth Plessner to Hans Blumenberg. These writers ask, how and why do we laugh, at what and
about whom do we laugh, etc. Why, to quote an example from Jean Paul, are we inclined to laugh when we
read that somebody, instead of falling on his knees, falls on his kneecap. We laugh because we become aware
of a difference, the difference between a solemn act of devotion and banal anatomy. Other questions
addressed in the lecture include: What is the social function of laughter? Is it subversive or harmless? Why and
when is laughter forbidden, and by whom? Drawing on Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and others, the lecture will
examine whether some of the theoretical notions they developed can help us to analyze scenarios of laughter
in Heine’s “The Rabbi of Bacherach” and in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.”

Rolf-Peter Janz is Professor Emeritus in the German Department of The Free University Berlin. His most recent
publications include Schwindelerfahrungen: Zur kulturhistorischen Diagnose eines vieldeutigen Phänomens (2003)
and Labyrinth und Spiel: Umdeutungen eines Mythos (2007) as well as numerous articles on Schiller, Kleist, Büchner,
Kafka, and W. Benjamin. His scholarship covers the literature and aesthetics of Classicism and Romanticism, Fin de
Siècle Vienna, and the Weimar Republic, as well as the reshaping of Greek myths in 20th-century literature. His
current research focuses on the connection between the sublime and the ridiculous, and on text-image relations.

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