Intact

“What characterizes the comical is the infinite satisfaction, the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself to be above one’s own contradiction, rather than seeing in it a cruel and unhappy situation.”

—Hegel, Aesthetics

In his approach to the comic, Hegel identifies the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself “above.” Thanks to this position of looking down from above, all the contradictions of the world are revealed as inconsistencies, as ridiculous pretensions; everything that is patently false collapses. But all the value of the world as it is—of the world as it is thought and produced—nevertheless remains, preserved in its broad strokes, its order and its organization.