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Canada)

Humor as a combination of contradictions. An aesthetic approach Author(s):

Jean-Philippe Uzel
Source: RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, Humour in
the Visual Arts and Visual Culture: Practices, Theories, and Histories / L'humour dans les arts
et la culture visuels : pratiques, théories et histoires (2012), pp. 87-97
Published by: AAUC/UAAC (Association des universités d'art du Canada / Universities
Art Association of Canada)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42630860
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Ùhumor as a combination of contradictions. An
aesthetic approach.
JEAN-PHILIPPEZEL , UNIVERSITE DU QUEBEC À MONTRÉAL

Abstract
This essay aims to establish that humour is not simply a style or an artistic genre among others, but is, rather, a core philosophical concept
that permeates reflections on art from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. Romantic philosophers were the Ont to
contend that humour marked a new reign of artistic subjectivity. Indeed, the philosophical aesthetics of jean Paul Johann Paul Friedrich
Richter) and Hegel award humour a paramount role in the aesthetic revolution of the time.Whether they revel in it jean Paul) or deplore it
(Hegel), they are the first to bring to light the observation that humour allows contradictory realities to coexist without friction and within a single
artistic proposition. It is precisely this idea that reappears, roughly a century later, in the techniques of Dadaist assemblage, in which Marcel
Duchamp saw a manifesta- tion of the "co-intelligence of the opposites." Recent writings by Jacques Ranciére support the view that Schiller,
Schelling, Hegel, among others, were the first philosophers to propose a new form of identification and of perception of art.This "aesthetic
regime of art" was no longer based on the laws of mimetic representation, but rather on "the mixing of heterogeneous elements." Building on
this theoretical framework, this essay demonstrates that Ranciére nevertheless overlooks the key function that humour plays in romantic
aesthetics and for the historical avant-gardes.

Humor is one of the dominant modes of contemporary visual
creation. There are countless sub-categories directly or
indirectly related to it: the clownish, the idiotic, the
carnivalesque, the playful... . Beyond the sometimes significant
differences that may exist between these hu- moristic forms of
contemporary art, one thing seems to unite them: far f r o m
being a disinterested game, humor is charged with a critical
function. When Allora & Calzadilla install a reproduction of the
Capitol statue on a sunbed, they question the overrated aspect of
American democracy (fig. 1; Armed Freedom Lying on a
Sunbed, 2011); when Maurizio Cattelan presents an efhgia of
Pope John Paul II toppled by a meteorite, he a t t a c k s the
credulity of the Christian faith (La Nona Ora, 1999); when
Gabriel Orozco reduces a Citroën DS by a third, he questions
one of the mythologies of consumer society (DS, 1993). It would
seem that the shifts in common sense introduced by humor are
ultimately more critically effective than the direct forms of
political art, which, in their denunciation of exploitation and
injustice, merely redouble inter- pretations that are already
widely accepted. It is precisely this thesis that Jacques Rancière
perceptively supports in his works of aesthetic philosophy,
which give pride of place to contemporary visual creation.
According to Rancière, critical art has undergone a major
transformation in recent decades. The polemical denunciation of
the system of domina- tion peculiar to the historical avant-
gardes, the latest echoes of which can be found in the proposals
of Krzysztof Wodiczko and Hans Haacke, would merely be part
of the am- biant consensus. Truly critical art would be a
dissensual art that creates a form of indeterminacy in sensory
experience and ordinary understanding of things. Humor and its
undecidable dimension would thus constitute one of the last
resistances to the transparency and literalness of the
communication society.
While acknowledging the accuracy of Rancière's analysis
of the critical function of humor in contemporary art, can we
claim that the humorous mode is the result of a recent
transformation in art? Could it be that the humorous form
waited for the decline of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde
before taking flight? Or, on the contrary, is t h e current
infatuation with humor hiding the true philosophical
significance of the concept? At least, that's the hypothesis we'd
like to defend here, not in order to invalidate Jacques Rancière's
theses, but on the contrary, to attempt to broaden their scope. If
Rancière, by limiting the hu- mour to one of the modalities of
contemporary art, doesn't give it all the philosophical scope it
deserves, he does provide us with the theoretical framework we
need to make it resonate.
this concept on the scale of aesthetic modernity2.
Recent works in aesthetic philosophy have all explored the new
regime of intelligibility and sensibility that Rancière calls the
"aesthetic regime of art". But this aesthetic regime is shaped by a
founding paradox: art becomes an Absolute at the very moment
when the boundary separating it from life is r e - q u e s t i o n e d .
From now on, artistic productions will be the scene of an incessant
exchange between fiction and reality, an exchange Rancière calls
the "mélange des hétérogènes". This paradox of an art that is both
sacralized and at the same time mixed with the ordinary forms of
life was first thought of, in his view, by the philosophers of the
Romantic* movement, from Schiller to the Schlegel brothers, from
Jean Paul to Hegel. It's worth noting t h a t , in all these thinkers,
humor plays a leading role, precisely because it allows the
heterogeneous elements present in the work to coexist. It is on this
point, ignored by Rancière, that we would like to focus,
concentrating in particular on two philosophers: Jean Paul, who
was the first to give humor a central place in aesthetic
Romanticism, and Hegel, who was the first to give humor a central
place in aesthetic Romanticism.

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 I Number 1 1 2012
Figure l. Allora & Calzadilla, Armed Freedom Lying on o Sunbed, 201 I,
sculpture and sunbed, installation presented at the U.S. Pavilion at the S4"
Venice Biennale, 165 x 256 x 134 cm (photo credit: Indianapolis Museum
of Art).
He is one of the main symptoms of the "end of art", that new era of
art which began with genre p a i n t i n g i n the 17th century and
reached its full flowering with the humorous novels of his
contemporary... . Jean Paul, precisely. Humor, as the fluidification
of opposites, will henceforth be at the heart of the esthet:ical
regime o f art. From the outset, it took on a critical dimension that
was constantly updated by the artists of the aesthetic regime of art,
including the avant-garde artists, first and foremost the Dadaists,
who made great use of it at the beginning of the 20th century.
Romantic Ehumour and
"mixing heterogeneous materials
Jacques Rancière is more than a little reticent about the notion of
modernity, which in his view presupposes forced conceptual
divisions and is always accompanied by a teleological vision of
history. In defining the "aesthetic regime of art" as a way of
identifying art, he is not seeking to propose a new rupture
between the old and the new, but to understand how
philosophers at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of
the 19th century looked at and thought about art outside all the
established rules, i.e. the rules that prevailed until then within the
"representative regime of art". This representative regime did not
disappear overnight-Rancière notes that the relationship to
images it established is still active, not least in the committed
forms of political art*-but it did enter into competition with the
new aesthetic thought that judged artistic productions
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mimesis, but rather to think of their irreducible singularity solely
i n terms of the spectator's sensibility, i.e., without any pre-
established law or concept. The major difference between the two
modes of identification lies i n the role played by mimesis. In
Rancière's system, mimesis is not simply a law of imitation of
nature, typical of classical artistic theory; it is, above all, the rule
that legislates artistic manners and practices as a whole, the rule
that determines the place and function of images i n society. What
is called into question by the aesthetic regime o f art is not only
t h e set of laws that impose on art the subjects worthy of
representation and the ways of representing them, b u t also, more
broadly, the apparatus of principles that guarantee an absolute seal
between fiction and reality. In the representational regime of art,
writes Rancière, taking up the concepts of Aristotelian aesthetics,
"the laws of mimcsis [. . .l define a. regulated relationship between
a way of making a poicsis and a way of being an aisthesis that is
affected by it", whereas in the aesthetic regime of art "poiesis and
1òisrúrsis relate immediately to each other"°. This immediate
relationship between artistic production and the viewer's sensibility
i s nonetheless a "detuned" one, i n v o l v i n g two forms o f
heterogeneity: the heterogeneity of reception o n t h e o n e
h a n d , since the spectator's aesthetic experience is no longer
monopolized by works of art, but can now be focused on any
natural or artificial object whose existence is less important than its
form; and the heterogeneity of production on the other, since the
rules that hitherto defined the hierarchy of the arts, the subjects to
be represented and the ways of representing them are losing the
prescriptive power they had for centuries. Rancière notes t h a t ,
while Kant was the first to consider the heterogeneous sensibility of
the spectator, it was Schiller who linked this to the productions of
art. In his view, the Lettres sur l'éducation esthétique ':L l'h "mme
(I 793-95) act as a "manifesto" for the aesthetic regime of art, as he
writes in Partage du Sensibk :
It [the aesthetic regime of art] affirms the absolute
singularity of art and at the same time destroys all
pragmatic criteria of this singularity. At the same time, it
establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms
with those by which life itself is formed. Schillerian Erai
rir/'Zrique, which is the pre-
The first-and, in a sense, indisputable-manifesto of this
regime clearly marks this fundamental identity of
opposites7,
For Rancière, then, aesthetics is not reducible to philosophical
aesthetics-the discipline that emerged in the early 18th century
with Addison, Du Bos and Hume, and whose aim is to study the
taste and sensibility of spectators.
 UZEL | Humor as a combination of contradictions
of comprehension and perception of an art worked by the mixture
of heterogeneities. This art, whose first stirrings can be traced back
to the seventeenth century and the emergence of genre painting,
was not created by the aesthetic regime of art, but was made
perceptible and intelligible by it: "What brings painting into this
new regime [...] is first a n d f o r e m o s t another way of seeing
the painting of the past. The destruction of the representative
regime of painting begins [. . .] with the rehabilitation o f the "pein-
ture de genre", this depiction of vulgar people engaged in vulgar
activities [. . .] ø 8 , If Rancière recognizes that this
rehabilitation of genre painting is above all due to the
In the aesthetics lecture Hegel gave in the 1820s, the idea of
heterogeneous art was born, according to him, at the end of the
18th century with post-Kantian idealism and Romanticism
(Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel. . .)*.
At the heart of the aesthetic regime lies the question of the
cohabitation and identity of heterogeneous elements, that "singular
knot, difficult to think about, that formed two centuries ago
between the sublimities of art and the noise of a water pump "0.
The aesthetic regime in fact makes it possible for the most
disparate ele- ments to coexist, since henceforth all subjects can be
the object of an artistic setting, the noblest as well as the most
trivial, and in all possible forms:
"Everything is equal, equally representable. And this "equally
representable" is the ruin of the representative system".
According to Rancière, this absolute equality of artistic subjects
can be found both in Stendhal's dir be Henry Brulard, which
describes the first aesthetic sensations of his youth in Grenoble
(the sound of the water pump mentioned above, but also the
bells of Saint-Andre church, the flute of a neighbor.), the
collage-paintings of the Dadaists, who introduced elements of
reality into their painting (tickets, clock springs, etc.), or the
most recent forms of contemporary art, such as the interventions
of the French collective Cømpemeør urbain. But the mixing of
heterogeneous elements in these works is also a game between
pure aesthetics and political action, between the disinterested
forms of aesthetic contemplation and the promises of political
emancipation. It is for this reason, according to Rancière, that in
the aesthetic regime, artistic practices don't have to choose
whether or n o t to be political, whether or not t o be
autonomous, but rather to assume the paradox of being
"political".
"the logic [of] an art that does politics on the express condition that
it does not do politics at all "Î2, and it is this founding paradox
between autonomy and heteronomy that lies at the heart of the
aesthetic regime o f art, a paradox that "posits the radical
autonomy of art [...] in the same gesture that abolishes the mimetic
clóture separating the reason of fictions and that of facts, the sphere
of representation and the other spheres of experience "*3. Rancière
is not the first to point out that artistic autonomy and heteronomy
are inextricably linked.
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This idea can already be found in Hegel's Aesthetics (as we shall
see), as well as in thinkers close to Hegelian thought, such as
Theodor Adornol4 But the author of Le Partage du Sensible is
certainly the first philosopher to explore in such detail h o w the
blurring between fiction and reality will, i n turn, encourage
the blending of different forms of artistic expression, ă starting
with the dicible (literature) and the visible (painting), whose
relationships were previously regulated by the hierarchy that
governed the distinction between the liberal and mechanical
arts. Rancière's reflections are always conducted in close
proximity to works borrowed from a l l disciplines and all
periods of the aesthetic regime, be they Flaubert's novels,
Mallarmé's poetry, Rineke Dijkstra's photographs, or the cinema
of
Pedro Costal
Yet, as we have already mentioned, Rancière's analysis
seems incomplete on one point: that of humor. Indeed, the
philosopher doesn't seem to see that humor is, for the first
thinkers of the aesthetic regime of art, the expression par
excellence of the new heterogeneous sensibility and the
privileged way to combine and articulate the contradictory
elements that cohabit within art. Although English aestheticians
were the first, in the early 18th century, to ă describe humor as an
aesthetic genre'*, i t must be admitted that it never had the
scope of a true philosophical concept. Joseph Addison, in issue
35 of the Spectator (April 10, 1711), gives one of the very first
descriptions of humor as a turn of mind that enters into an
artistic composition, in this case a play'7, He notes, however, the
difficulty he has in defining humor, and acknowledges that it is
much easier to say what it is not than what it is, his article
aiming above all to å criticize the extravagant forms of humor,
those
"raving incoherent pieces
that he regretfully saw proliferating in his day. Finally, he uses
allegory to offer a semblance of definition, affirming that humor
is the son of Spirit (Wit) and Gaiety (Mirth), as opposed to false
humor, which is the son of Laughter and Frenzy. Despite the
novelty of this point of view, which for the first time dissociates
6umour from /7umeur in order to give it an aesthetic dimension,
it w a s not until the end of the century and the thinkers of
German idealism and romanticism that humour took on its full
philosophical di- mension. From the outset, they described
humor as the form that unites the heterogeneous, enabling, for
example, the su- blime and the absurd to coexist in the same
composition. In an exchange of letters dated January 1798,
Goethe describes to Schiller t h e impression made on him b y
Domenico Cimarosa's last opera:
 Number 1 | 2012

As for the text, it's in the Italian style, and I've explained to
myself how it's possible for silliness, absurdities even, to be
so happily combined with the highest magnificence of
musical inspiration. It's the 6u- ntour alone that produces this
result, for humor, even without being poetic, is a kind of
poetry, and by its nature lifts us above the subject.

And Schiller replied: "Your observations on opera reminded me

of the ideas I developed extensively in my Her- mes eitheiiqug$
şş18 It is interesting to note for our purposes
that, while Schiller does not address the question of humor in
his Letters, he does associate it with the various "ideas" he
develops there, such as the instinct for play and free
appearance, concepts which, according to Rancière, constitute
the "unsurpassable manifesto" of the aesthetic regime of art.
However, it wasn't until a few years later that we found the
great theoretician of Romantic humor in the novelist and
philosopher Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, known as Jean Paul
(fig. 2). Firstly, because his novels - from the publication of
f;frspñw, on Quarantc-cinq Jours de la poste an chien (1795),
which was a resounding success in Germany - are infused with
an unbridled sense of humor that earned Jean Paul the epithet
ńumorisre. He himself speaks of his pro- fessional writing in the
following terms:

Strange ideas crawl out of every corner of his brain, each

one a simile, each one the ancestor of a whole family of
metaphors [...]. He encloses dissimilar things in a simile, Figure 2: Heinrich Pfenninger,)eon Paul (}ohonn Paul Friedrich Richter ,
parks screaming images between two commas, responds 1798, oil on canvas, 65.5 x 49.5 cm, coll. Literary Museum Das Gleimhaus,
in me- taphoric dissonance, cuts a long allegory out of a Halberstadt (photo credit: Literary Museum Das Gleimhaus, Halberstadt).
likeness [...] and paints the soap bubbles of his thought in
all the colors of the rainbow**.

But above all, because his thoughts on humor in his 1804 Coun
préparatoire d'csthetiquc are, along with those of Friedrich
Schlegel, the most elaborate in German Romanticism. This
work of aesthetics, which itself is not devoid of humor as its
title alone proves, places this concept at the heart of its aesthetic
edifice. Jean Paul devotes no less than four chapters out of
fifteen to the trailer of comedy, poetic humor, the differences
between epic, dramatic and lyrical humor, and the wit (le m ) .
For him, humor is nothing less than an "inverted sublime"
because humor refers to the infinite, but always from its
opposite the finite, acting as "a finite applied to the infinite "20.
Jean Paul afhrme that humor differs from other figures of comic
style, such as parody or irony, precisely i n t h e way it brings
together heterogeneous elements: "it lowers the great, but it is,
unlike parody, in order to bring it into line with the sublime.
the small, and raises the small, but unlike irony, to accomodate
the large ц2l, the philosopher insists particularly on the
importance that revét subjectivity in the form
humorous, since it gives free rein to t h e artist' s unbridled
imagination, which connects and assembles the mostdisparate
things and ideas, in complete
opposition to the classical model dominated solely by the
objectivity of the rules of art. This is particularly true, in his view,
of the tique l'on ordinaire traduit en français par irøir d'esprit
ou encore mm d'csprit and which i1 should not be confused with
the English hit, l'esprit of which Addison speaks-which he defines
as follows: "le trait d'esprit au sens strict est plutót l'inventeur
relations of resemblance between incommensurate sizes
(without common measure) şş22, By making the Ritz the faculty
humorous par excellence, Jean Paul is part of a tra- dition that runs
through all of modern German philosophy, from the 16th century
right up to Freud, who devoted a major work to him.

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 UZEL l Ehumour as a combination of contradictions
work23 , culminating in the Romanticism of the Jena Circle, and
particularly in the writings of Frie- drich Schlegel24 , the Wifz, as
"the faculty of inventing a combination of heterogeneous
things")25 is not in essence a "work of art".
artistic ability. Just as Goethe noted in Cimarosa's libretto that
humor was not in itself poetic, Friedrich Schlegel remarked in the
Athenaeum's "Fragments" that Romanticism must "poeticize the
Witz, fill and saturate the Witz".
forms of art from every kind of native substance of culture, and
animate them with the pulsations of humor )J2Ú This concept
translates
However, it is perfectly in tune with the new sensibility of the
aesthetic regime o f art a s conceived by Rancière, since it
requires us to grasp the things of art in their irreducible
singularity, outside all the canons bequeathed by artistic
tradition. Without pre-established rules, confronted with an
infinite number of objects, the creative imagina- tion indulges in
combinations of disparate elements that are as dazzling as they
are unusual. The dir brings to light new relationships between
things, but relationships that seem nonetheless motivated by
secret afhnities. Fragment thirty-seven of the Athenaeum states
that "Many of the findings of the Witz
are like the unexpected reunion, after a long se- paration, of two
friendly thoughts J)27, Jean Paul sets out to demonstrate, both
through his work as a philosopher and as a writer, that
novelist, that humor is the privileged link of an aesthetic
subjectivity freed from all the shackles of classicism. But just as
the aesthetic éfnr of the Schillerian spectator translates the hope of
a new society (the Úrnr eirúérique), With also conceals a political
program from which the German nation of "fixed, frozen, glued,
nailed ideas" could greatly benefit. Jean Paul affirms that "the trait
d'esprit alone gives us freedom, by first g i v i n g us equality".
"and asks that "the young people of the p28, romantic poetry
schools be given more practice in wit, and in
At its heart, Romantic humor is the remedy "for the critical days of
a sick age" p29,
However, the Cours préparatoire d'esthétique is not
enough on its own to highlight humor as a central concept of the
new aesthetic revolution. Firstly, it's clear that, for both Jean
Paul and Schlegel, the aesthetic revolution was essentially about
poetry, and very little about other art forms (even if music is
occasionally mentioned in their writings). Romantic
philosophers agree with Winckelmann that the last great
painters were those of the Renaissance and that, consequently,
the revolution underway in the literary sphere d o e s not
concern poetry.
painting or, more generally, the plastic arts*0
The Course's second limitation is that, while the examples it
provides are drawn from the history of world literature, the
author's diagnosis of the transformations of artistic subjectivity
is primarily concerned with contempo-
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raine, i.e. Romantic poetry. Jean Paul's analyses of the hu-
mour focus on what he sees as a genre shift away from the
classical model, without realizing that it is in fact a paradigm
shift.
Hegel's humor and the end of art
It is precisely these two limits that Hegel's Nrúe'riqur will
challenge, making humor (as in the novels o f Jean Paul) a
symptom o f a new period in art, that of the artist's absolute
freedom: "Humor [...] shook and destroyed every fixed principle,
broke every law, and allowed art t o rise above itself "*'. Hegel's
position on humor is singular, since he denounces the stylistic
excesses and false sensibility of the humorous form, w h i l e a t
t h e s a m e t i m e recognizing its cardinal place in the history of
art. Here, Hegel combines the finesse of the observer who perceives
the transformations in t h e art of his time with unrivalled insight,
with the intransigence of the dogmatic philosopher who rejects art
forms that do not fit into his system of thought. But let's not forget
that he was the first to see humor not simply as a modality of
Romantic aesthetics, b u t a s the symp- tóme of a new age o f
art.
According to Hegel, the coming period marks the end of a
conception of art that prevailed from Greek antiquity to the 18th
century, and which placed art at the service o f the Spirit: "Art is
and remains, from the point of v i e w o f its highest purpose,
something o f the past ' d2 i this theme of the "end of art" is one of
of modern aesthetics, it has to be said that this has most often been
to the detriment of Hegel's theses. Among recent interpretations,
one need only consult the works of Hans Belting or Arthur Danto**
to realize that their conception of the "end of art" has little to do
with the Hegelian position, even if they do refer to it explicitly. In
addition to the twists and turns that his writings are subjected to, it
is often forgotten to mention that Hegel pays extremely close
attention to the examples of works that best embody, in his view,
the end of art. Indeed, the German philosopher meticulously
analyzes two artistic genres that are symptomatic of this
dissolution: Jean Paul's prose novels, and Dutch and Flemish genre
painting. If the Hegelian interpretation of genre painting is one of
the examples that Jacques Rancière frequently gives to illustrate the
new mode of intel1igibilité of art proper to the aesthetic regime - as
his latest work, in which an entire chapter is dedicated to
Hegel's reading of Murillo's paintings34 , he pays no attention to
t h e question of humor, which is, in fact, one of Hegel's main
concerns.
central here*5. Indeed, the whole point of Hegel's position will
be to show that not only poetic humour and the

genre painting are two symptoms of the new artistic sensibi-
lity, but above all that they are two symptoms inextricably ă
linked to each other. To fully understand his sometimes arduous
reasoning, it seems important to follow it step by step. Let's start
b y recalling that, for Hegel, the end of art corresponds to the
end of the roitiøisúqur form of art as embodied in the religious
painting of the Middle Ages and th e Renaissance. Unlike its
predecessor, the rbiiqee form, which had found in Greek
statuary a perfect equilibrium between the inner content of the
work (spirituality) and its outer form (plasticity), the Romantic
form shatters this harmony, abandoning the outer appearance of
the work in favor of its content (religious spirituality). In a
painting depicting the birth of Christ, writes Hegel, "oxen and
asses, crib and straw are an essential part of the ta- ble "**. In
the end, it was this original imbalance-between a content strictly
oriented towards individual spirituality and an increasingly free
form imitating the objects of common life-that, as it worsened,
eventually led to the dissolution of the Romantic form of art
when, from the XVII' century onwards, it turned away from
religious representation in favor of a more artistic form.
turned to genre painting:
In the representations of Romantic art, everything has a
place. All spheres, all manifestations of life, the greatest
and the smallest, the highest and the lowest, the moral
and the immoral, feature equally. In particular, as art
becomes more profane, it delves more and more into the
peculiarities of the real world, attaches a predilection to
them, attributes a high value to them, and the artist has
well accomplished his task the moment he has
faithfully representedĄ7
These various elements of everyday life have no symbolic or
allegorical value; they are represented for their own sake, in their
anecdotal dimension, and ultimately empty art of all spiritual
content, leading to its dissolution. To illustrate this "prosaic
objectivity" of art, Hegel takes Dutch and Flemish genre painting as
an example, citing paintings by Adriaen van Ostade (fig. 3), David
Teniers, Jan Steens and Gerard Terboch, who depict "grapes,
flowers, deer, trees, dunes, the sea, the sun, t h e sky, objects that
serve as ornaments or adornments i n common life, horses,
warriors, peasants, the action of smoking or pulling teeth, all kinds
of do- mestic scenes "* . This long list of motifs, which Hegel
repeats and adds to several t i m e s , serves t o highlight t h e fact
that the subjects of genre painting are as varied as reality itself.
Hegel also notes that the dissolu- tion of Romantic art is manifest in
the fact that Dutch painters not only meticulously reproduce
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Number 1 | 2012
They systematically emphasize the most accidental aspects of
nature: "[Eart] purposely seeks to distance himself from the
accidents of real life in itself, which is often ugly and prosaic.
Here, consequently, a question arises: whether, in general, such
productions can still be called works of art "**. Hegel thus
hypothesizes that the end of the Romantic form of art is
tantamount to the end of art altogether, with art now merging
with reality at its most trivial. Art would become non-art. But to
leave it at this interpretation, as is often done, would be to miss
the point of t h e demonstration, since the philosopher
immediately adds that "art also contains another element, which
is of particular importance here.
essential importance [and means] that we cannot deny productions
of this kind the title of work of art JJ40 This other
element, it is the artist's talent that succeeds in perfectly
rendering the appearance of the most fleeting and hard-to-
represent things: the reflections of satin and velvet, the most
varied play of light and even the vaporous shape of clouds. But
the painter's art, according to Hegel, is not limited to the perfect
mastery of his technique; it also consists in giving free rein to
his imagination to recompose the natural order of things in an
eminently arbitrary way, to the point where his personality
invades the totality of his composition and becomes its true
subject. And yet, according to Hegel, the artist's subjectivity is
never so fully expressed as in humor, because the humorous
form offers the artist total freedom to indulge in inat- tended
comparisons between the most disparate elements: "In humor, it
is the person of the artist who puts himself entirely on stage [...]
through the power of his own ideas, through flashes of
imagination and striking conceptions [...] the representa-
tion is n o t h i n g more than a game of the imagination, which
combines objects as it pleases, altering and upsetting their
relationships [. . ,] ))41, It is, according to him, the poetry of his
contemporary Jean Paul that illustrates
subjective humor", because "more than any other, he [Jean Paul]
seeks to produce the effect of bizarre connections between the most
distant objects. He sows haphazardly, he piles up ideas that have no
connection except in his own mind.
imagination Jş42, this exacerbated subjectivity would already mark
art, but this end should not be understood here as a completion,
in the sense that humor represents the final stage in the evolution
of Western art, but rather as an interruption: humor literally
takes art out of history. Hegel considers humor to be above all a
form of regression. It would take art back to the pre-Classical
stage of symbolic form, as embodied in Egyptian architecture
from the time of the Pharaohs: "by bringing together and
combining materials gathered from all parts of the earth, it is
possible to create a new form of art.
 UZEL l Humor as a combination of contradictions

Figure 3. Adriaen van Ostade, Village barber arching a tooth, c. 1637, oil on oak panel, 33.3 - 41.5 cm, coll. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (photo credit:
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

of the world, of all realms of reality, humor retro-grades to the
symbol, in which form and meaning soflt Égalemeflt ÚtràngÒreS l'uflt- à
l'àutrt°"43.
The key to this demonstration, which is of the utmost
interest to our investigation of humor within the aesthetic
regime of art, consists in asserting that the two examples
mentioned as "symptoms" of the dissolution of Romantic art -
the meticulous imitation of "accidents of the outside world" in
Dutch genre painting, and "the whims of personality" in the
humorous poetry of Jean Paul - are both "symptoms" of the
dissolution of Romantic art.
are not mutually exclusive, but that on the contrary "there is a
relationship between these two extremes }}44, Indeed, Hegel
remarks
that in certain artistic compositions, such as epigrams, we are in
the presence of "a donor who is somewhat objective". The latter
focuses on the most ano- dine objects, but "joins them with a
deeper feeling, a witticism, a meaningful reflection, a vivid and
brilliant turn of ima- gination, which enlivens and enlarges the
smallest things by the poetic way of grasping and representing
them".45 However, no more than subjective humor, objective
humor finds favor i n Hegel's eyes. He immediately describes it
as a minor, banal genre that quickly becomes bland and tedious,
just like Jean Paul's novels, which fail to avoid sentimentality.
But never mind the depreciatory opinion

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 I Number 1 1 2012

What we need to focus on is the fact that the concept of ńumour

o@rrfifpermet shows that Jean Paul's humour and the
heterogeneity of genre painting are part of one and the same
phenomenon, one and the same revolution of sensibility. It is
indeed humor, as the ultimate expression of the artist's
subjectivity, that ensures that artistic productions that leave
room for the пrri'frnreJ (to the
In other words, the "smallest things" do not lose "the title of
work of art" - in a word, do not fall into the realm of non-art.
It's clear, then, that the "relationship" between the two extremes
of humor and genre painting is a paradoxical one, enabling the
simultaneous coexistence of art and non-art-pa- radox that
Jacques Rancière, as we've seen, places at the heart of the
aesthetic regime of art. But this paradoxical relationship also
exists within each of these artistic genres: the Dutch painters
enjoy endless freedom in their depiction of nature4Ó$just as
Jean Paul works with the objectivity of reality, which enters his
novels from all sides.

Ehumour as mood

It's a safe bet that Hegel's disdain for the art of his time stems
in part from the fact that the para-doxal relationship at work
here is in no way a dialectical one, in the precise sense he gives
to this concept. We know that dialectic, which takes the form of
triplicity (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), is one of the fundamental
concepts of Hegelian idealism, which explains the movement of
the Spirit through history. Dialectic consists precisely in the
overcoming of contradictions, since the opposition between
thesis and antithesis is only momentary, and always finds its
resolution in synthesis. In other words, contradiction in the
Hegelian system exists only to be overcome. In the humorous Figure 4: Man Ray, Objet indestructible, 1923, metronome and
photographic collage, 22.2 x 12 x I I cm (photo credit: Man Ray
process, however, Hegel observes that contradictions do not
Trust / SODRAC - 2012)
disappear, but coexist without cancelling each other out.
Contradiction in the art he calls "modern" is no longer a stage,
but a permanent state. This certainly explains the radical aspect
of his condemnation: "It often happens that humor is bland and
insignificant [...] when the most heterogeneous objects are used of their polarity. Humor functions here as a fluidification of
in the same way. contradictions, rediscovering its original meaning: that of the
nes are brought together with a quirkiness calculated to produce Latin ømor, that liquid substance which, it w a s believed,
effect şJ48, Let us note, however, for Hegel's benefit, that enabled an organism to function by lubricating friction.
All Western philosophy since Aristotle has been founded on the Etymological dictionaries remind us that the French word
principle of non-contradiction, which asserts that there can b e Sumner was borrowed from the English language in the mid-
no relationship of conjunction between a thing and its opposite: 18* century, and that the English word humour comes from the
proposition A and proposition non-A can never coexist, but Old French word humeur, which refers to the various liquid
only exclude each otherH*. substances in the human body, whose equilibrium
It is precisely this principle of non-contradiction that is was supposed to define the temperament of individuals*0
challenged by romantic humor, allowing opposites to coexist in Lńumorïrmr
the same whole. This coha- bitation is made possible by an is the ancient medical doctrine which asserted that the
attenuation, almost a temperament of human beings was defined by four cardinal
humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). We also
know that

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 UZEL | Humor as a combination of contradictions
that this doctrine of moods played a leading role in artistic
theory from the time of the famous Problem XXX,1 by the
pseudo-Aristotle, who claimed that artistic genius affected those
who suffered from an excess of black bile, the famous mean-
elm Jiø5'. The fact is, however, that the modern concept of
humor has not completely broken with the umor of the ancients.
Indeed, as Anne Souriau reminds us, "awareness of the humor-
humor equi- valence led some authors, such as Bergson, to
make /2umøur a feminine noun "52.
Even today, some theorists ex- plicitly claim this
Equivalence between humor and humor. This is the case, for
example, of Lewis Hyde, who examines the way in which the
trickster, that prankster god present in all eras and cultures
(Hermes and Dionysus in ancient Greece; Sun Wukong, the
king of the monkeys, in Asia; Coyote in North America; Eshu-
Legba in West Africa; Renard
and Harlequin53 in Europe...), u s i n g humor to transgress
the principle of non-contradiction:
here there is real ambivalence, then, where one can
truthfully say both "I am attached to my mamma" and "I
am not attached to my mamma," the loser is that e r s o n
who chooses a single side of the contradiction. The of
such singlemindedness is contradiction without humor
ra- ther than contradiction with a smile. Here it may help
to re- surrect the old meaning of "humor": the word once
referred to fluids (thus the bodily "humors") and comes
ultimately from a Latin root (umor) having to do with
moisture, liquid, dampness. To treat ambivalence with
humor is to keep it loose; humor oils the joint where
contradictions meet*4.
Hyde goes on to show that the trickster is always at the
crossroads, possessing both the power to impede and to facilitate
passage. This is true not only of the mythological figures of the
trickster, but also of certain twentieth-century artists (Marcel
Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, John Cage) who are said to have
drawn on the facilitating power of humor. Hyde examines,
among other things, Duchamp's concept of the "corridor of
humor "**, by which the Dadaist artist would have emphasized
the liberating power of the humorous form, which would have
enabled him to escape the contradictions of bourgeois culture.
We can agree with the American anthropologist that humor
always played an essential role in Duchamp's practice5*.
However, rather than the "corridor of humor", we feel that
another Duchampian concept better captures the fluidizing logic
of humor: that of the "cointelligence of opposites"(57). Thanks
to humor, heterogeneous elements not only no longer exclude
each other, but are able to cohabit. From the first ready-mades
of 1913-14 to Êtant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gas
d'éclairage (1946-66), it would be easy to show that
D u c h a m p never ceased to embody this principle of
cointelligence in
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his work. Of course, the same applies to other Dadaists, starting
with Francis Picabia and Man Ray, who enjoyed a close friendship
with Marcel Duchamp, i n which humor played a key role* . Yet
these artists were among the first to explore new montage
techniques (whether ready-made, collage, photomontage o r
assemblage) t h a t enabled them t o explore the blurring between
art and non-art as never before. Contrary to Ran- cière's assertions,
which seem to follow in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin5*, this
shows that the mixing of heterogeneities in the historical avant-
garde did not systematically take the form of shock and polemics° .
Dadaist montage, by juxtaposing disparate elements or presenting
elements of reality in an unusual mode, also sought to ă produce a
humorous eífect. As Jean-Hubert Martin points out in relation to
Cadeau (1921) and Objet indestructible (1923) (fig. 4), two Man
R a y assemblages: "Man Ray's humour found expression in his
assemblages [. . .]. Their eífect was usually derived from
juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements that sparked a sense of
comic strangeness "*'. It has to be said, then, that t h e critical
effect of Dadaism - and of other historical avant-gardes such as
Constructivism and Futurism - is also mediated by humor. But if
this critical function of humor doesn't date back to the 1990s, as
Rancière maintains, neither does it date back to the 1910s. It can be
traced back to Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism, for whom
humor was the faculty par excellence of mixing heterogeneities,
and one of the essential elements of t h e art identification regime
that emerged a t t h e end of the 18th century. If theorists today
are re-reading the history
of modern and contemporary art ă l'aide du Vifz*2, C'eSt d'tlne
in a way proves that the humorous form theorized by Romantic
thought is still very much at work.
Notes
See Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l'esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004),
pp. 73 ff.
2 We use the term "aesthetic modernity" here in the sense of
"modernity".
for the sake of clarity, while being aware that Rancière, as we
shall see, rejects it.
3 In this article, we use the term "romanticism" in the sense of
"romanticism".
We're not getting into technical considerations that would force
us to distinguish between the pre-romanticism of a Schiller, the
post-romanticism of a Hegel, the "para-romanticism" of a Jean
Paul and the romanticism of the Jena circle (the Schlegel
brothers, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).
Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du senSibL', Paris, La Fabrique, 2000,
p. 26M5.

Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipe, Paris, La Fabrique, 2008,
p. 57-59.
Rancière, MalaiSe dans l'esthétique, op. cit. p. 16-17.
Rancière, Le Partage du sensible, op. cit. p. 33.
8 Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des images, Paris, La Fabrique, 2003,
p. 136.
Kant does not participate in this new regime o f identification o f
art, for while Rancière acknowledges that he is one of the first
thinkers to explore the new heterogeneous sensibility of the
subject-spectator, he also notes that he has no thought of art: "[...]
the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment does not know 1 'aesthetic'
as a theory. It knows only the adjective 'aesthetic', which
designates a type of judgment and not a domain of objects."
Jacques Ran- cière, L'inconscient esthétique, Paris, Galilée, 2001,
p. 13.
î0 Rancière, Malaise dans l'esthétique, op. cit. p. 25.
11 Rancière, Le Destin des images, op. cit. p. 136.
12 Rancière, Malaise dans l'esthétique, ap. cit. p. 66.
13 Rancière, Le DeStin des images, op. cit., p. 139.
14 Theodor W. Adorrio, Théorie esthétique [1970], trans. M. Jime-
nez, Paris, Klincksieck, 1995, pp. 311-13 and 348M9. Rancière
quotes Adorno on this subject in Malaise dans l'esthétique, op. air,
p. 57-59.
15 One of Jacques Rancière's latest books is a collection of film
analyses; Jacques Rancière, Frs Ecarts du cinéma, Paris, La
Fabrique, 2011.
16 Cf. Robert Escarpit, L'Humour, Paris, Presses universitaires de
France, 1960, p. 38 ff.
17 Joseph Addison, The WorL's of joseph Addison: Volume 1 (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1845), pp. 64-66.
18 J.W. Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, Correspondence between Goethe
and Schiller
Schiller, Tome 1, trans. Baroness de Carlowitz, Paris, Charpentier,
1863, p. 423.
l9 Jean Paul quoted by Jean-Luc Nancy and Anne-Marie Lang, "Présen-
tation" in Jean Paul, Cours préparatoire d'esthétique [1804], trans.
A.-M. Lang, Lausanne, EÂge d'homme, 1975, p. 10.
20 Ibid, p. 129.
21 Ibid, p. 129-30.
22 Ibid, p. 171.
23 Sigmund Freud, Le Mat d'csprit et Sa Relation à lincanscient
1905], trans. D. Messier, Paris, Gallimard, 1988.
24 Particularly in the "Fragmenu critiques" published in 1797
in the journal Lérie des beaux-arts and in the "Fragments"
published in the first volume of the journal Athenaeum in 1798.
25 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, LAbsolu litté-
raire, Paris, Seuil, 1978, p. 437.
26 Friedrich Schlegel, "Fragments", quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy, eds, LAbsolu littéraire, op. cit. p. 112.
27 Friedrich Schleiermacher (attributed to), "Fragments" quoted in La-
coue-Labarthe and Nancy, eds, LAbsolu linéraire, op. cit. p. 103.
28 Jean Paul, Cours préparataire d'esthétique, op. cix. p. 191-92.
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l Number 12012
29 Ibid, p. 25.
30 If Winckelmann, in his Lettres sur limiiatian. . . (1755) made
Raphael the last of the great painters, Schlegel, in his Descrip-
tions de tabkaux (1803), set his sights on Albrecht Altdorfer, and
Schelling, in his Discours des arts plastiques (1807), on Guido Reni.
31 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Mal. I [1832], trans.
C. Bénard, Paris, Librairie générale de France, 1997, p. 743.
32 Ibid, p. 62.
33 Hans Belting, Is the History of Art Finished? [1983], trans. J.-F.
Poirier er Y. Michaud, Nîmes, J. Chambon, 1989; Arthur Danto,
LArt contemporain et la clôture de l'histoire [1997], trans. C.
Hary-Schaeffer, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
34 Jacques Rancière, AisthesiS, PariS, Galilée, 2011, p. 41-59. See
also: Rancière, Ée Destin des images, op. cit. pp. 88-89 and
p. 151; L'inconscient esthétique, ap. cit. p. 31-32; £e Spectateur
emancipc, op. cit. p. 127; Malaise dans l'€Sthétique, op. 'it. p. 14 and
p. 17-18; Le partage du sensible, op. cit. p. 35.
35 It's interesting to note that on the very brief and rare occasions
when Rancière alludes to Hegel's theses on )ean Paul, he mentions
the latter as a "fantasist" without any particular reference to humor:
"The true successors of genre painters are no longer painters: they
are, says Hegel, romantic writers, those who exhaust themselves
animating with the wings of their "free fantasy" the prosaic places
and episodes that are the theater of their headless stories. "
Rancière, Aisthesis, ap. cit. p. 57. Or again: "As early as the 1820s,
a philosopher by the name of Hegel [showed] [ . . . ] that the
claimed sublime discrepancy was perhaps no more than the
endlessly repeated cock-a-doodle-doo of the 'fantasist', capable of
uniting everything with anything"; Rancière, Destin des images,
op.cit., p. 53.
36 Hegel, Aesthetics: sol. I, op. cit. , p. 729.
37 Ibid. p. 728-29.
38 Ibid, p. 733.
39 Ibid, p. 730.
40 Ibid, p. 731.
41 Ibid, p. 736.
42 Ibid, p. 737.
43
Ibid, p. 737.
44 Ibid, p. 745.
45 Ibid, p. 746.
46 It's worth noting, although Hegel doesn't mention it, that genre
painting itself is not devoid of humor, as evidenced by the genre
scenes painted by Adriaen van Os- tade and Jan Steen. Cf. Mariët
Westermann, "How was Jan Steen Funny? Strategies and
Functions of Comic Painting in the Seven- teenth Cerituiy", i n
Jan Bremmer & Herman Roodenburg, eds, A Cultural History
ofHumor, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997,
p. 134-78.
47 Cf. Alexis Philonenko, Reading Hegel's "Phenamenalogy",
Paris, Vrin, 1993, p. 81 ff,
 UZEL | Ehumour as a combination of contradictions

48 Ibid,p. 73G-37. The same is true of the critical distancing of Brechtian theater;
49 "[...] that the same at the same time belongs and does not belong to Rancière, Malaisc dans l'esthétique, op. cit., pp. 67-68.
the same and in the same relation, is impossible. [...] This is the ** Jean-Hubert Martin, "Funny Guys", in Jennifer Mundy, ed.
firmest principle of all principles"; Aristotle, Les MetaphysiifHCS Duchamp, Man Ray Picabia, exhibition catalog, London, Tate
(book Gamma, 3, 1005 b), trans. A. de Muralt, Paris, Les Belles Modem, 2008, p. 123.
Lettres, 2010, p. 101. *2 Christophe Viart, ed., Le Witz: figures de l'esprit et formes de l'art,
50 Eancien français will only retain the ancient meaning of "bitter" as Brussels, La Lettre Volée, 2005.
a res-
English, which borrowed the French term in the 17th century, saw
humor as a cheerful, playful character which, in the 18th century,
became the ability to represent reality in a pleasant way, described
by Joseph Addison in 1711; Cf. Alain Rey, ed., Dictionnaire
histarique de la langue française, Paris, Le Robert, 2010, p. 1049.
51 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Frirz Saxl, Sanirne and
Melancholy [1964], trans. F. Durand-Bogaert and L. Évrard, Paris,
Gallimard, 1989.
52 Anne Souriau, "EHumour", in Étienne Souriau, ed.
bulaire d'esthétique, Paris, Presses universitaires de F-rance, 1990,
p. 839. The thirteenth P.U.F. "Quadrige" edition (2010) of
Bergson's Le Rire inexplicably corrects the passage alluded to by
Anne Souriau, and accords the past participle to the masculine
("Ehumour, ainsi défini...", p. 97).
53 Jean Paul, Court préparatoire d'esthé- tique, ap. cii., p. 157.
54 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Mates this World: MiSchief, Myth, and Art,
New York, North Point Press, 1999, p. 274.
55 Ibid.
56 In 1961, Alain Jouffroy asked him the following question:
"Duchamp replied: "Absolutely [...] I'm very keen on it, because
seriousness is a very dangerous thing. To avoid seriousness, you
have to use humor"; quoted in Alain Jouffroy, "Conversations with
Marcel Duchamp", in Une Révolution du regard [1961], Paris,
Gallimard, 2008, p. 118.
57 Marcel Duchamp, "Note no 185", in N'otes [1980] , Paris,
Flammarion, 1999, p. 112.
58 This was underlined by two exhibitions that were held
simultaneously on this trio of artists in 2008 in Paris and London:
SurexpoSition: Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia-Scxe, Humaur and
Fla- menco (Passage de Retz, March 19-June 15, 2008) and
Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia (Tate Modem, January 21-May 26,
2008).
59 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility
technique" [1939], in Œuvres III, trans. M. de Gandillac, Paris,
Gallimard, 2000, pp. 307-10.
60 The different types of avant-garde "collages" evoked by
In Rancière's view, they were all intended to provoke a shock in
the viewer: a shock produced by the strangeness between two
worlds in Surrealism, by the highlighting of ca-

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