In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard

Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing such are the examples Kant s Critique of Judgment offers for a free and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghaus s book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely modern phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and radicalize Kant s move. Menninghaus shows parergonality and nonsense to be two key features in the spread of the arabesque from architecture and the fine arts to philosophy and finally to literature. On the one hand, comparative readings of the parergon in Enlightenment aesthetics, Kant, and Schlegel reveal the importance of this term for establishing the very notion of a self-reflective work of art. On the other hand, drawing on Kant s posthumous anthropological notebooks, Menninghaus extrapolates an entire Kantian theory of what it means to produce nonsense and why the Critique of Judgment defines genius precisely through the power (as well as the dangers) of doing so.