According to Hegel, art in its ‘supreme task’ is engaged in ‘bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit’. Raymond Geuss, in a highly illuminating paper, has connected Hegel’s conception of art’s supreme task with the project of theodicy. In this paper I explore Hegel’s aesthetics of comedy through this theodicy-based framework Geuss has proposed, and I consider what light this framework can shed on comedy and, reciprocally, (...) what light comedy can shed on it. In particular, invocation of a theodicy can give the impression of art as a kind of defense of the status quo. Yet Hegel’s brief, but pivotal remarks on comedy complicate this picture in an interesting way. The best comedy does reassure us about the basic rationality and goodness of the world. Yet Aristophanic comedy—the sort Hegel lauds as the best and the most truly comic—has a strongly social-critical streak that Hegel notes with great admiration. Hegel’s theory of comedy says as much about him as it does about the genre. But if we are attentive to Hegel’s remarks on comedy, they will offer us a point of resistance against overly Panglossian interpretations of the Hegelian supreme task of art and will help us better understand in what way active social criticism through art is compatible with that higher calling. (shrink)

Explores the full extent of Hegel's interest in tragedy and comedy throughout his works and extends from more literary and dramatic issues to questions about the role these genres play in the history of society and religion.

The history of political philosophy is marked by a conception of politics as inherently tragic. As such, it has hardly ever been systematically contrasted with the other model of dramatic art, comedy. In this article, I explore the relation between Hegel's twofold notion of drama as an ordered genre of disorder – what he considers to be the highest form of self-reflective art – and the post-foundational concept of radical democracy. After outlining the interplay between order and disorder in post-foundationalist (...) theories of political difference, I summarize the way in which the steps of Hegel's poetics consecutively build on each other and elaborate the role of the dramatic genres. By means of a genealogical reconstruction of the respective concepts of democracy and drama, I demonstrate the extent to which these two methodologies correspond to poetic and political order formation in a structural homology. This conceptualization concludes with the assertion of a constitutive dramatization of political modernity which does not, however, culminate in the concept of political tragedy but points towards a still-to-be-realized, comically ordered democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel reasons that comedy responds to the fact that democratic ideals become a subject for a joke when enacted: progressive values such as free speech enable...

This thesis defines the philosophical concept of speculation and assessesits emergence in Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy, in the attempted construction of a post-Enlightenment “scientific” philosophy and alongside early work in anthropology and gynaecology. It argues that in the historical elaboration of the problem of speculation “race” and “sex” emerge as concerns for this newly defined scientific philosophy. Moreover, a concept of performativity is introduced in the attempt to think the ontological implications or “effects” of speculative thought. This thesis proposes (...) that Hegel is the originator of such a concept of performativity, introduced as the conclusion to the Science of Logic. Here, performativity is defined as activity of form or determinate being in contrast to the empty notion of being pure being with which the Logic begins. Speculation, the Logic proposes, is not only a methodological necessity giving rise to an essentially epistemological problem, as Kant had defined it, but is also to be thought as ontological Thätigkeit proper. Rewriting speculation as an ontological concept of form, Hegel uses, among others, social and political examples to illustrate the nature of speculative thought. The surprising appearance of the state and the sexual relation in the Logic, alongside the concepts of violence, resistance, power and freedom, demonstrates that speculative reason necessarily encounters political categories and suggests that these might be exemplary of its nature. While it remains unclear, in Hegel, precisely how the unfolding of conceptual form leads to political categories, both Irigaray and Butler offer answers to this question. In doing so, they separately outline ways of thinking the ontological dimension of speculative thought: Irigaray by modifying speculation as speculation – an attempt to visualise speculation and to render its social dimensions visible; and Butler by formulating the concept of gender performativity. This thesis offers its own answer, too, by situating the emergence of speculation and performativity as philosophical concepts in the context of the history of modern gynaecology and the speculum. It reads these concepts alongside those of sexual difference, Geschlecht and gender, arguing that only in this way can speculation and performativity be thought. (shrink)