Abstract
Hegel was the first major philosophical figure to put comedy on top of the classic triad of genres, above epic and tragedy. Moreover, as has been suggested by thinkers as different as Jacques Lacan, Bertolt Brecht, and Judith Butler, Hegel’s dialectics itself could be conceived as a real comical performance. Following and expanding this insight on the comicality of the Hegelian dialectic, this contribution aims to explore the peculiar comical texture of the experience of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. By doing so, the chapter will shed some light on the many existing resonances between the phenomenological itinerary of consciousness and the obstinate practice of revolutionary partisanship.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Hegel’s outline, Romantic art is the third and last form of art, after Symbolic art and Plastic art—that is divided in turn into the three stages of painting, music, and poetry. Poetry in turn consists of three different components: epic (objective pathos), lyric (subjective pathos), and dramatic poetry (the genre of reconciliation).
- 2.
For Hegel, Aristophanes’ comedy “presents to us the absolute contradiction between (a) the true essence of religion and political and ethical life, and (b) the subjective attitude of citizens and individuals who should give actuality to that essence” (Hegel 1975, II 1222).
- 3.
The beginning provides a good example of the logic of failure at play in the Phenomenology. The journey starts with the unwary natural consciousness struggling with its sense-certainty and the slippery contents it attempts to seize (Hegel 1977, 58–66). Sense-certainty takes as true only what it can access through the senses, namely the singular now and here, and by investing all its efforts in the grasping of immediate knowledge, it pursues an inconsistent goal which nonetheless it attempts to achieve with seriousness and conviction. However, since both its goal and the means are revealed to be “inherently null” as in the first type of comedy (Hegel 1975, II, 1200), sense-certainty deserves to fail, its alleged rich and concrete content turning out to be the poorest and most abstract one, its truth vanishing into its opposite, namely into a being at the mercy of any consciousness.
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Mascat, J.M.H. (2019). Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness: On Comedy and Revolutionary Partisanship. In: Mascat, J., Moder, G. (eds) The Object of Comedy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_4
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