Introduction to Satire as a General Aesthetic Problem

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of satire – the satirical in a wider sense, taking into account that it ultimately depends upon critical intent and thus can never wholly be assigned a categorical aesthetic value like the beautiful, the sublime or the humorous, which are autonomous values. The argument is grounded on an examination of satire as a constitutive criterion (art and life) as well as a theoretical one (genre, given universal realizations, poetics and categorical aesthetic values). Both the assessment of fundamentals and that of universal and historical moments offer an overview of a rich aesthetic and ethical horizon, of continuity and discontinuity, although they ultimately converge in the permanence of critical intentionality and the resultant interminability of categorical aesthetics.