Abstract
The concept of Witz, as it appears in fragments by Friedrich Schlegel, published between 1798 and 1800, is connected to the aesthetic understanding and was revisited by Walter Benjamin in The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism. Witz is part of the romantic "philosophical terminology", a moment in a critical reflection on a work of art in which sudden knowledge is given. In the work of art, Witz operates an illumination of different levels: semantically, it appears as a figure of style of suddenness, or as parabasis, the break that self-explains the work. Witz, etymologically, would be a corruption of "wissen" (to know), represented by the metaphor of light. The original term Witz maintains a sound similarity to Blitz (lightning), as the knowledge that emerges into consciousness suddenly, like the lightning, a sudden illumination of the scene. Witz / Bliz are in a conceptual pair, i.e., the sound of the terms allows visual and phonetic exchanges that meet the semantic possibilities, making it a pair of opposites.
Keywords:
Friedrich Schlegel; Walter Benjamin; Witz; German Romanticism