“Humour is, then, the experience of the essential lack of self­ coincidence. That is to say, humour is a powerful example of what we might call the human being’s eccentricity with regard to itself. Perhaps the most fundamental feature of what it means to be human is the fact that we do not coincide with ourselves, the material body that I am is not the same as the experience of thinking that I have. That is, there is an experiential gap between being and having, between the being that one is and having a relation to that being. More plainly stated, the human being has a reflective attitude towards its experiences and towards itself. This is why human beings are eccentric, because they live beyond the limits set for them by nature by taking up a distance from their immediate experience. In living outside itself in its reflective activity, the human being achieves a break with nature. The philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner goes further and claims that the human is this break, this gap between being and having, between the physical and the psychical. The working out of the consequences of the eccentric position of the human is the main task of a philosophical anthropology, which is why laughter has such an absolutely central place in Plessner’s work.”

–simon critchley, infinitely demanding