Unorderly Delights: The Concept of the Grotesque in the Aesthetics of Kant, Hegel, and Victor Hugo

Over the course of five hundred years, the grotesque came to acquire a wealth of meanings, forms, and functions, spanning from naive drolleries to hideous atrocities. The variety of its historical manifestations challenges unambiguous assertions about its significance and value in modern western culture. This dissertation reconsiders the concept of the grotesque in the context of modern aesthetics, particularly the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, developing a philosophical framework to address the transformation of the concept at the turn of the nineteenth century. My analysis focuses on the period extending from 1790, the date of the first publication of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, to the 1820s, when Victor Hugo articulated the Romantic paradigm of the grotesque in his Preface to Cromwell and Hegel delivered his famous lectures on fine art at the University of Berlin. This period corresponds to a major shift in the history of the grotesque under the influence of a new, Romantic sensibility, which legitimized the grotesque as a central principle of modern artistic expression and intensified its sinister overtones. The Romantic revival of the grotesque belongs to a broader philosophical debate about the legitimacy of art in modern secular societies and the importance of aesthetic sensibility in the mediation between nature and freedom. The aim of this study is thus twofold: on the one hand, to critically examine the Romantic paradigm of the grotesque from the perspective of Kant and Hegel; on the other hand, to investigate the tension between the sensible and the supersensible in Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics through the lens of the grotesque. Broadly construed, the grotesque can be conceived as the extreme distortion of natural forms, especially the human form, in an exaggerated expression of human corporeality and animality that is deemed incongruous with rational principles. In response to the first aim of the study, I argue that, within Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics, we find two strands of grotesqueness: a revelatory strand that presupposes a deliberate attempt to express or embody the supersensible, and a recreational strand that results from the carefree play with forms, often with no concern for the content or meaning of the work. From the perspective of Kant and Hegel, both strands fail to provide a truthful insight into the supersensible. Instead, they are grounded in a radical affirmation of particularity: in the revelatory grotesque, particularity assumes an objective guise, latching on to rational principles, whereas in the recreational grotesque, it tends to be recognized and valued for its own sake, disregarding objectivity. In either case, the grotesque exaggerates the chasm between our natural inclinations and our rational aspirations, suggesting the weakness and contingency of human reason. From the perspective of Kant and Hegel, the grotesque can only afford a self-contradictory and unsustainable model of reconciliation, since it undermines our awareness of ourselves as rational, self-determining agents and thus hinders the realization of human freedom in the phenomenal world. It is, therefore, plausible that Kant and Hegel were reluctant to recognize the relevance of the revelatory grotesque in European modernity, after the Enlightenment had supposedly purged reason from sensuous excesses. Insofar as the grotesque persists in modernity, it is, in their view, deprived of transcendent aspirations, restricted to the individual, and strictly opposed to reason and understanding. Following the second aim of the study, I argue that the concept of the grotesque enhances our understanding of the attempts to reconcile freedom and nature within Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics in three ways. First, the grotesque reveals the depths of nature (within and outside us) as impenetrable by rationality, challenging Kant’s principle of purposiven