What does it mean to be human And more precisely what does it mean to be human now with both humanism and the humanities in crisis In answer to these questions Laughing on the Brink of Humanity seeks not some essence of the human but rather an epiphenomenal manifestationa sign of the human. The book finds such a sign in the joyless painful and often deadly laughter that resonates when we cross the barrier between what is human and what is not animality machinery divinity. Jan Miernowski brings together a wide swath of discourses and figures from Plato and the Bible through early modern humanism to Friedrich Nietzsche Georges Bataille Hannah Arendt Claude Lanzmann Spike Jonze Tom Stoppard and Michel Houellebecq.