Hegel's theory of comedy in the context of hegelian and modern reflections on comedy

Abstract

Few contemporary critics discuss Hegel's theory of comedy (') Yet Hegel's theory invites our attention for at least four reasons. First, Hegel offers two major insights into comedy, the importance of sub jectivity and particularity as the dominant categories of the genre and recognition of comedy as the negation of negativity or the mockery of an untenable position. Second, unlike his theory of tragedy, which offers a historical division into ancient and modern tragedy, Hegel presents a transhistorical, if albeit brief, discussion of types of come dy. His typology, though suggestive, is at odds with his system and so offers us an example of the tension that sometimes surfaces in Hegel between macro- and microstructures. Third, comedy occupies a cen tral position in Hegel's Aesthetics. In all the lecture notes on Hegel's Aesthetics, comedy has the last word; with comedy the discussion of art concludes. Moreover, two of the most important aesthetic cate gories in the immediate post-Hegelian period were the ugly and the comic, concepts that for the Hegelians were closely linked. Hegel's immediate successors, attuned to systematic aspects of the Hegelian system, knew the centrality of these concepts both for Hegel's system and for the viability of idealist aesthetics in modernity; my paper (1) In contrast, Hegel's theory of tragedy has received more attention. Not only is it considered, next to Aristotle's and ahead of Nietzsche's, the second most important theory of tragedy in the Western world, it is even employed by critics who disparage Hegel and everything Hegelian and are simultaneously unaware of their source (Moss). A detailed evaluation of Hegel's theory of both genres, with a fuller account of the secondary literature, is available in my book Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel (Albany: SUNY, 1998).