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281Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017)© Norbert Elias Stichting, Amsterdam.Essay on LaughterNorbert EliasEdited by Anca ParvulescuWe all smile and laugh occasionally. To do so is as much part of a nor-mal human existence as to eat or drink. But while one can invariably un-derstand the part played in our life by eating and drinking, it is much more difficult to grasp that of smiling and of laughing. Many other living things eat and drink; few of them can smile or laugh. Norbert Elias started working on “Essay on Laughter” in 1956. He wrote drafts for parts of this essay, in English, while on the sociology faculty at University of Leicester. There are ninety-one manuscript pages in the “Laughter” folder at Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar. The manuscript consists of three plans for the essay, drafts of a few sections, handwritten notebooks, a lecture, and newspaper clippings. We are publishing this essay with permission of the copyright holder, Norbert Elias Stichting, Amsterdam. Elias often wrote multiple versions of the same paragraphs. The manuscript is typed, but there are numerous handwritten edits, additions, and notes. In the editing process, when possible, I chose the version that seems to be the last Elias completed. In a few instances, in an attempt to recuperate the complexity of Elias’s thinking across his multiple drafts, I created composite paragraphs out of the various versions. Editing included eliminating typos and other errors, adding punctuation, condensing some sections (marked in footnotes), eliminating repetitions, and bringing together sections on the same theme. Elias’s footnotes are unmarked, while editorial notes are marked as such. We formatted the essay with a view to retaining the unfinished, fragmentary nature of the manuscript. While the essay has a beginning and while its incomplete middle fragments can be retraced in Elias’s various plans, it does not have a conclusion. Elias did not propose a solution to the “riddle of laughter.” In his autobiographical Notes on a Lifetime he foregrounded the importance of this project to his intellectual trajectory; see Norbert Elias, Notes on a Lifetime, in The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, trans. Edmund
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