	This paper is foremost a commentary on the death and rebirth of humans as non-rational beings. It is anti-Enlightenment, but mostly in relation to modern day philosophy departments. It is pro-laughter, specifically your own. 

 In the carnivalesque spirit, I shall strive to imitate this style. The Avengers references will gradually increase prominence within the footnotes and eventually make their way up into the body of the text. Thus the boundaries of film and novel, comedy and drama, and even information relevant and irrelevant to this essay shall be blurred and possibly dissolved. Binaries shall be objected to, strongly. (The word “shall,” likely a residual effect of this year’s re-watching of The Ten Commandments, will hopefully disappear.)
	The binary has lazily but pervasively become a fundamental construct in every academic discipline. It seems innocuous at first: why can there not be two of things? And having accepted two qualities as particularly apt, why not set them at fundamental opposition? I do not wish to deny the mental framework of binaries its due. Certainly, a plethora of intellectual achievements owe a debt to “the terrible twos.” The difficulty - the terribleness, I claim - of these twos is that they obscure all other numbers, all other frameworks. No longer can an arbitrary number of qualities - five, eleven, one hundred and eighty-three - dictate the analysis of any of life’s phenomena beyond the hard sciences. 
Equally, it has forced clear oppositions where contradictory concepts once lay in peace with each other. This is Bakhtin’s concern in Rabelais and His World: he argues that the tradition of folk humor perceives a unity within nature. In carnival, life always coincides with imagery of death, and death always carries with it reminders of rebirth. Humor is always ambivalent, acting as both a creative and destructive force. Humans are social creatures, always incomplete, constantly engaging with the world outside of them, and this interaction necessitates contradiction. Bakhtin says the Enlightenment tore apart this unity of contradictions with its atomistic conception of the individual. When the experiences of individuals are fundamentally separate from each other, life does not connote death and death does not connote life. Rationality means that humor can either be critical and meaningful or joyous and meaningless. To be sure, some good things have come out of the developments of the seventeenth century. It just also happened to destroy our ability to think in certain exciting ways.
	For instance, the Enlightenment deeply damaged our view of laughter. 
I quote this not just because of the delightful contrast to current debates over when life begins, but it is worth mentioning that defining humanity at conception provides a fundamentally closed off view of the human being. The fetus is only inside the mother’s womb by coincidence, one would think. Anyway, Aristotle was not alone in thinking of laughter as fundamental to humanity. 
Why this information appears in a footnote rather than the main text of Rabelais and His World will always be a mystery. Laughter here is a creative force not just for humanity but for the entire world. It goes against the post-Enlightenment rational mindset to give laughter that power - science is supposed to create, and everyone knows equations in physics are not a comedic realm. Laughter is actually vitally important, and the case is made again - less anecdotally - in another of Bakhtin’s footnotes, quoting nineteenth century Russian thinker Alexander Herzen:
