Humour as the inverted sublime : Jean Paul's laughter within limitations

Jean Paul (21 March 1763-14 November 1825), born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humourous novels and stories. He took the name Jean Paul in honour of Jean Jacques Rousseau. This paper presents an interpretation of Jean Paul's concept of humour as 'inverted sublime'. It explores the concept, first by analyzing it in relation to Kant's aesthetic theory, and then by way of a critical engagement with Paul Fleming's The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humour: perhaps the only book-length critical study in English devoted to Jean Paul in recent years. The first part of the paper"”the comparative analysis of Jean Paul with Kant"”establishes the conditions for taking humour seriously (as something that resists categorization in terms of the body/mind split). The second part develops these insights by posing questions such as what consequences does humour have for the seriousness of theoretical judgement? Following twentieth century philosopher Georges Bataille, I suggest that laughter is an effect of the unknown (le non-savoir), which suddenly invades us when our expectations are exceeded. Laughter, for Bataille, is an instance of nonproductive expenditure. On the basis of Bataille's thought and that of others, I undertake a critical reading of Paul Fleming's argument for humour's "redemptive" power, i.e., its capacity to help us reconcile ourselves with human fortitude. As a challenge to the logic of both Jean Paul and Paul Fleming, the paper concludes with a reading of concentration camp humour in Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunfower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness.