Allegory
Allegory
Allegory
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Allegory: Betweie Deconuio ~'~n ~VD !~i~~~~~la' ;~ ~~' ~ " ....
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and Dialectics
Gail Day
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
Gail Day
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Gail Day
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
II
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Gail Day
opposition of 'thing' to the 'personal', or of 'the fragment' to 'the total'.1 17. Benjamin, p. 191.
Benjamin suggests that both symbol and allegory became debased concepts in 18. Benjamin, p. 192.
the hands of those who had sought to elevate the former over the latter. 19. Benjamin, p. 197.
Initially the later Romantics and, later still, the neo-Kantians, he remarks, used 20. Benjamin, 'Central Park', New German
this false symbol to evade art's ethical dimension. In his Trauerspiel study, Critique, vol. 34, 1985, p. 38. The notes making
up 'Central Park' were collected under this title
Benjamin challenges the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Carl Horst for
from 1939 tol940.
attempting to maintain a subservient status for allegory. They fail, he says, to
21. Benjamin, 'Central Park', p. 36.
grasp these concepts in their dialectical complexity. Although their concept of
the symbol sounds dialectical, Benjamin insists that it had sunk into a pale
shadow. This 'distorted conception of the symbol', he argues, lacks 'dialectical
rigour'; what claims to be a dialectic of appearance and essence is nothing but a
paradox, and 'fails to do justice to content in formal analysis and to form in the
aesthetics of content'.12 This emphasis on dialectics is striking in its insistence.
The 'baroque apotheosis', he argues, 'is a dialectical one' and 'is accomplished
in the movement between extremes';13 allegory's temporality is dialectical,
and an understanding of Baroque drama requires a dialectical sense of
allegory;14 we need a dialectical discussion of allegory's antinomies; and we
need a consideration of allegory's dialectic of form and its dialectic of
content.15
The play of antinomies in Benjamin's text is interesting, not least for the
roles accorded to a range of visual properties. Benjamin explains how, in
Baroque drama, there is a structural division in which the acts are interrupted
by interludes, the latter assaulting the drama's 'claim to be a Greek temple'.16
These interludes emphasize the 'genuinely visual' (Novalis) and 'spectacle
proper' with the tableau vivant,'7 and the 'display of expressive statuary':
With all the power at its disposal the will to allegory makes use of the 'dumb show' to bring
back the fading word, in order to make it accessible to the unimaginative visual faculty.18
The division between the action of the acts and the frozen nature of the
interludes echoes, for Benjamin, the division of dream and reality, or of
meaning and reality. Often seen by the critics as a deadening device, Benjamin
suggests that these interludes are best thought of as 'the irregular rhythm of
the constant pause, the sudden change of direction, and consolidation into new
rigidity'.19 This sense of a moment of frozen movement can be found
throughout Benjamin's writing: for example, in the famous formulation- one
especially favoured by Adorno - of 'dialectics at a standstill'. Similarly, it is
there in the 'dialectical image', 'the image of transfixed unrest'20 or even
Benjamin's analogy of allegory and the Stations of the Cross.21 The disjunction,
then, is not static but is presented as if it were akin to the children's games of
musical statues or peep-behind-the-curtain: there is a good deal of movement
before the 'freeze-moment', and, it could be argued, just as much during it.
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
The point to emphasize here is not simply the fact of disjunction and
discontinuity, but the play of interchanges and effects set in motion.
22. Benjamin, p. 183. Against the false faith in the symbol Benjamin presents allegory as a
23. Benjamin, p. 183.
repressed negative power:
The antithesis of sound and meaning could not but be at its most intense where both could be
successfully combined into one, without their actually cohering in the sense of forming an
organic linguistic structure.26
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Gail Day
is stronger: allegory (or that which allegory recognizes) is the ground of any
act of choosing; this act either acknowledges or denies that ground.
33. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 57.
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
35. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 77. is precisely this 'safe' or 'secure' deconstruction that de Man hopes to
36. In this sense, certain dialectical accounts -
undermine. Deconstructive claims to superiority are challenged along with
and Adorno springs to mind - may come closer their targets. The consequences for de Man's own argument are this: not only
to this version of deconstruction than much self- must symbolic and the mimetic claims be traumatized, so must allegorical
professed deconstruction. An alternate reading
would be to say that de Man is more Hegelian
ones. De Man's strategy could be described (although inadequately) as a
than deconstructive. The labels here - and the radicalizing of deconstruction. By this I do not mean that de Man is a sort of
invocation to choose between, or allocate expert trump-card player, always raising the stakes for the sake of the victory.
different accounts to, them - fail to respond
The stakes, indeed, are raised, but no victory follows. It does not need saying
adequately to the material. Jameson goes as far
as to argue that de Man and Derrida 'have that de Man is no leftist; nevertheless, his account shares with many leftist
nothing whatsoever to do with each other', the traditions of thought an epistemological exploration and a desire to push
latter being preoccupied with how to imagine
negative moments further.36
the unimaginable, inaccessible, radical
difference, with how to pose in language a pre- This is where 'Giotto's Charity' becomes significant for de Man's argument.
linguistic moment, the former with 'the birth of In this episode from 'Swann's Way', Marcel, Proust's fictional narrator,
abstraction and indeed philosophical
conceptuality as such'. See Fredric Jameson,
considers photographic reproductions of Giotto's Vices and Virtues in the
Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late Arena Chapel.37 The occasion is prompted by thoughts about the kitchen-maid
capitalism (Verso: London and New York, who works at the family's Combray home. Swann, a friend of Marcel's father
1991), p. 225, p. 227. Norris parallels de
Manian deconstruction with Adornian negative
and bearer of these photographic gifts, had nicknamed the kitchen-maid
dialectics: 'Deconstruction is indeed a form of 'Giotto's Charity'. In Proust's narration, Marcel considers several ways of
negative dialectics, an activity that carries on the seeing this resemblance. It is the unpacking of the relations of resemblance and
project of immanent or self-reflective critique
nonresemblance on which the substantive issues turn. The phrase 'Giotto's
developed by Hegel out of Kant, but which
turns this project against its own desire for such Charity' becomes, in Swann's hands, a metaphor for the kitchen-maid because
premature endpoints as Symbol or Absolute he sees maid and fresco as physiognomically alike. For Marcel, the
Reason'. See Christopher Norris, Paul de Man:
resemblance between maid and fresco is a more complex affair, and turns
Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology
(Routledge: New York and London, 1988), on the inability of each to grasp its own significance; in other words, it turns
p. 61. on the disjunction between 'vehicle' and its proper, or allegorical, meaning.
37. The role of these photographic The kitchen-maid is pregnant, and the fresco of Charity show her carrying a
reproductions is, I think, significant for the
basket. Marcel thinks that the maid is blind to the spiritual import of her
account although I do not pursue it here. For
the sake of simplicity, and to avoid the 'mysterious basket' (that is, the bulge of her pregnancy). Moreover, his
inevitable mise-en-abyme, I refer simply to the interpretation of the real and the allegorical cross over. The actual, particular
fresco.
kitchen-maid seems, to Marcel, to signify abstractly and figurally; she is, he
notes, but one moment in an ongoing representation of the quality of 'kitchen-
maid-ness'. Meanwhile the power of Giotto's allegorical fresco, he thinks,
resides in its realistic vehicle. What should be an abstract personification
resolves into the look of secular particularity: an everyday scene of someone
handing up a corkscrew through the cellar window. Both kitchen-maid and
fresco are representations, de Man notes, and both are representations that
require reading.
In de Man's account, then, Proust takes the reader from symbol to allegory,
primarily by shifting from Swann's perspective to Marcel's. We might - and
here it is necessary to engage in a detailed reading of the passages in de Man -
break down de Man's account as follows:
(i) The symbol's synthesis (in the proper meaning) of literal and figural is
played out across the figure of the kitchen-maid and her basic resemblance to
the fresco. This is Swann's perspective, although he lacks the terms to describe
it this way. Here several oppositions seem reconciled: particular and universal,
matron and virgin, profane and sacred, low and high.
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Gail Day
the fresco images, with passing reference to the kitchen-maid, who simply
serves to show the same process of crossing from the opposite direction.
38. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past,
(iii) Initially, however, Marcel does not like this discordance, and sees the
vol. 1 (Penguin Books: London, 1983), trans.
frescoes as failures. The discordance between their 'look' and their meaning is C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin,
so pronounced that Charity was 'Charity devoid of charity', Justice looked p. 88.
more like Injustice, and Envy failed to invoke vice and looked more like a 39. Proust, Remembrance, p. 89.
medical illustration. These discordances hinder Marcel's attainment of the 40. Proust, Remembrance, p. 88.
symbolic reconciliation that Swann can attain. Marcel judges the frescoes as
failed symbols. In their failure and awkwardness they are allegorical. At this
point, however, he recognizes the strength of allegory. He sees in the
discordance not shortcomings but the core of frescoes' power or 'special
beauty'. It is this that Swann, in his ignorance of the difficulties, is oblivious to.
I came to understand that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes
derived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was
represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolized was nowhere expressed) but as a
reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to
the meaning of the work, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it
imparted.38
(iv) It is crucial to grasp that this is not just a revaluation of allegory, in the
sense of placing a plus where once there had stood a minus (and here we will
see the difference of this reading with the claims of a postmodern 'allegorical
impulse' which has inverted the rule of the symbolic). Marcel's shift in
appreciation is quite distinct. It rests neither on seeing the frescoes as symbols,
nor simply on seeing the disjunctive mode summarized by 'Charity devoid of
charity'. Instead it depends on Marcel's recognition of the necessity of the
vehicle (the literal representation) for the allegory no matter how divorced
their relation appears. To be precise, this necessity works across the
disjunction. Marcel realizes that the fresco's meaning is more forceful because
of the realistic representation that seems 'devoid of charity'. Indeed, the
allegory is dependent upon a literal representation that is disjunct from the
proper meaning; allegory, asserts de Man, cannot do without the powers of
literal representation. There is not, then, a simple opposition between the
literal and allegorical meanings, but a disjunction that articulates something
like a dialectic of mutual dependence. Marcel goes on to note that in real life
the 'truly saintly embodiments of practical charity' never appear remotely
compassionate, but are as brusque as 'a busy surgeon'.9 He makes the
following analogy with his understanding of the frescoes:
... are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure,
visceral aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death
actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a
crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we
are accustomed to give the name of Death?40
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
and even degenerate. So, for instance, de Man describes a deflection through
which the literal representation overtakes the proper allegorical meaning. With
41. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 75. Giotto's Invidia, or Envy, an iconic detail is hyperbolized: the exaggerated
emphasis on the serpent-tongue - and we might extend the example to her ears
42. De Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement'
(1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia - almost obliterates the proper meaning. We look at Envy, but we do not think
University Press: New York, 1984), p. 81. about the vice (the proper meaning), nor do we attend to goodness and virtue
43. De Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', (the proper intent). De Man puts it this way: 'the allegorical representation
p. 208-28.
leads towards a meaning that diverges from the initial meaning to the point of
44. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2, foreclosing its manifestation'. The force of our fixation upon such details, he
p. 62.
argues, redirects our thoughts: '. . . the mind is distracted towards something
45. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2,
even more threatening than vice, namely death'.4
p. 61. The emphasis is Owens'.
47. De Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', Death, de Man famously wrote in 'Autobiography as De-Facement', is 'a
p. 222.
displaced name for a temporal predicament'.42 This is the same negative self-
knowledge that he attends to in his consideration of allegory in 'The Rhetoric
of Temporality', where he also discusses Baudelaire's concept of irony or le
comique absolu.43 Again, de Man warns of impatience. He criticizes the over-
hasty recovery of irony or its use in the service of self-satisfied triumphalism.
This reinforces the distinction between de Man's account of irony and its
travestied form; the latter is no more than a second-order knowingness that
figures prominently in some recent accounts of art and theory. For de Man,
such recovery turns irony back into 'simple comedy'. The inter-subjective act
of laughing at others (simple comedy) defuses the intra-subjective
consequences of irony. He sees irony's self-reflexive economy not simply as
a linguistic disjunction but more specifically as an 'unrelieved vertige'.
We should be able to see from this that de Man's account contrasts with
Owens' conception of aporia. The structure of the latter's disjunction seems
far less traumatized. Moreover, his version of allegory - functioning as
theoretical armature for the account of postmodern practices - is remarkably
affirmative in character. In the process the negative dynamics evident in de
Man's allegory have disappeared. Laurie Anderson's Americans on the Move takes
on a particularly significant status in Owens' explanation of allegory,
presenting, he argues, 'the world [as] a vast network of signs . . . [which]
continually elicits reading, interpretation'.44 The signs cannot be read
straightforwardly, however, and, with regard to a specific example from
Anderson, he states that 'two clearly defined but mutually incompatible readings
are engaged in blind confrontation in such a way that it is impossible to choose
between them'.45 Meanwhile, in his discussion of Rauschenberg's work,
Owens suggests that it functions as 'the narration - the allegory - of its own
fundamental illegibility'.46 The postmodern reading of de Man focuses on his
refusal of closure or reconciliation, and his emphasis on repetition. It is
inclined to do so, however, without de Man's sense of ever-exacerbating
aporia and increasing negative self-knowledge.
Although the focus varies, the processes of degeneration and paralysis recur
through de Man's writings. Of irony in 'The Rhetoric of Temporality' he wrote:
More clearly even than allegory, the rhetorical mode of irony takes us back to the predicament
of the conscious subject; this consciousness is clearly an unhappy one that strives to move
beyond and outside itself.47
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Gail Day
central to the wider discussions of allegory, often in sublimated form (for 49. This might follow from the widely
most accounts of a postmodern orientation it is more forbidden than discussed anthropological readings of the master-
slave dialectic.
sublimated). The figure of the unhappy consciousness occurs elsewhere in de
50. Fletcher, Allegory, p. 159, p. 341.
Man's work. Typically his efforts focus on preventing a condition of negation
51. Honig, Dark Conceit, p. 68.
being turned into affirmation. He notes, for instance, that one commentator
treats the unhappy consciousness as a condition of 'plenitude', and lacks 52. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 68.
'dialectical anxiety'.48 My interest in the unhappy consciousness is not to spot 53. Honig, Dark Conceit, p. 68.
legitimating (if unfashionable) sources. Nor am I interested in some potential 54. Benjamin, 'Central Park', p. 51.
existential thematic which is suggested rather too readily by the name 'the 55. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason:
unhappy consciousness'.49 Rather, I am concerned with the set of The Aesthetics of Modernity (Sage Publications:
London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 1994),
interchanges and transformations that the unhappy consciousness figures and
trans. Patrick Camiller, pp. 76-7.
with the patterns of movements it registers in de Man's version of aporia.
56. Benjamin, p. 192.
Moreover, the crucial point is to recognize the degenerative and exacerbating
57. Benjamin, p. 198.
tendencies in such dynamics. Indeed, one does not have to look too far in the
standard literature on allegory to find similar qualities highlighted. The 58. Benjamin, p. 199.
commentaries on allegorical literature characterize modern forms of allegory 59. Benjamin, p. 199.
Every idea, however abstract, is compressed into an image, and this image, however concrete,
is then stamped out in verbal form.59
These tropes are not traditional poetic metaphors - or, rather, they do not
behave as such- because they serve to act otherwise. In Benjamin's account,
they invert their traditional characteristics and fail to emphasize the
metaphorical character of the formulation. Indeed, the 'visuality' implied by
such loaded metaphors, their 'imagistic' use of language - we might say: their
excess of metaphoricity- serves to undermine the metaphor itself. The point
about metaphor's excess is important, and contrasts to the usual characteristics
attributed to metaphor where it finds its ultimate moment in its 'image'. The
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
66. The critique of 'negativistic quiet' comes As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would the allegorical intention
from 'Left-Wing Melancholy. (On Erich fall from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its bottomless depths ... 64
Kiistner's new book of poems)', Screen, no. 2,
Summer 1974, p. 30.
In the final pages of his book on the Baroque, Benjamin charts how 'the direction
67. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 52.
of allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns,
68. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 44. to redeem'.65 As has often been noted, Benjamin advocates a 'resolution' of
Cf. Verfremdungseffekt and the aim to alienate us
from our alienation.
allegory's destructive potential - or, at least, a leap - into praxis. Benjamin
qualifies his approval of 'destructive' work within, at least in part, the context of
69. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 52.
his politicization, criticizing the nihilistic repercussions of unhindered and
70. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 53.
indeterminate negativity, and the revelling in 'a negativistic quiet'.66
71. See Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer'
(1934), Understanding Brecht (New Left Books:
Benjamin Buchloh adopts a similar argument in his discussion of allegory
London, 1973), trans. Anna Bostock, and 'allegorical deconstruction'. Surveying allegorical practices in art, he
pp. 85-103. distinguishes the work of Sherrie Levine and Martha Rosler. Levine's strategy
72. Buchloh, for instance, registers some unease is presented as closest to the allegorical melancholic, and 'the strongest
with presenting the paradigm of Rosler as a
negation within the gallery framework'.67 Buchloh describes how 'The
solution, suggesting that her work, due to its
very externality, is subject to a certain allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the
impotence. status of a commodity by devaluating it a second time in allegorical practice'.68
Levine, he says, 'devalues the object of representation for the second time'.
Her 'apparently radical denial of authorship', however, is 'complacent in
defeat', encouraging a 'fatalistic acceptance' and 'a silent complacency in the
face of the static conditions of reified existence'. Such work does not open
what Buchloh calls 'a dimension of critical negativity'.69 Like Benjamin's
melancholic it endures 'the violence of the passive denial that the allegorical
subject imposes upon itself as well as upon the objects of its choice'.70 Buchloh
sees in Benjamin's work - particularly in the work on Baudelaire and in the
essay 'The Author as Producer' - a move from the melancholic to the
political.71 For Buchloh it is Martha Rosler's work that best approximates this
latter sense of allegorical praxis. This wing of allegorical (or beyond
allegorical) activity is interventionist in character, and produces art outside the
accepted frames of reference. It 'produces' radical work, he argues, and
refuses to supply the apparatus.
The favoured option of many writers is the resort, finally, to Benjamin in his
Brechtian mode, even when glossed with Adornian cautions.72 But what
happens if we do not come to rest too quickly on this familiar status of 'The
Author as Producer' and pursue things a little further? My point here is not to
dismiss this essay, nor the practices working self-consciously with its legacy;
on the contrary, such work has often been formed under conditions of political
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Gail Day
and historical urgency. Rather, my aim is to follow the argument. The more
we move into the difficulties posed at the heart of the debate on allegory the
more intriguing it becomes. Indeed, we are referred not just to different 73. De Man, 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion',
modalities of representation. We find ourselves instead at the heart of a p. 52.
problem: the relation of representation to the real. This issue has become the 74. Norris, Paul de Man, p. 78. 'Rhetoric may
ground for easy statements and instant opinions. However, the central figure as the problematic term, the aspect of
language that complicates the move from
questions in debates on allegory represent real points of difficulty for theory:
phenomenal perception to concepts of pure
representation, knowledge, attempts to know the real or represent it, and, by understanding. But it can exert this
extension, we might include questions such as realism, materialism, etc. deconstructive leverage only in so far as it
remains an activity of thought closely in touch
Allegory criticizes a simplistic understanding of mimesis as much as it does the
with epistemology and critical reason' (p. 94).
grandiose claims of the symbol, but there is no naive 'beyond' or cheap
75. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol in Hegel's
dismissal of the problems raised. The debates on allegory, and the work of Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, Summer 1982,
both de Man and Benjamin- whatever their differences, whatever their p. 771. This essay is reprinted in Aesthetic
Ideology.
drawbacks - address such matters as the very stakes of their projects. De Man
emphasizes that allegorical texts raise the difficulty of 'moving from 76. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773.
Allegory is the purveyor of demanding truths, and thus its burden is to articulate an 79. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 774.
epistemological order of truth and deceit with a narrative or compositional order of
80. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 768.
persuasion.73
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Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics
figural mode of the symbol, the very model it has to do away with if it is to
occur at all.81
81. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773. To claim that the sign can only survive as a symbol is not to return us to the
For it is to misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we make a distinction between the store of
images, in which this about-turn into salvation and redemption takes place, and that grim store
which signifies death and damnation. For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction, in
which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon allegorical
contemplation, rather than its ideal quality.84
VI
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Gail Day
to visual cultural phenomenon. But this discussion of 'images' - favourable or Manchester, 1986), p. 70.
not - cannot be collapsed into an art historian's sense of an 'image', no more 90. The phrase is Tim Clark's - the title of a
session from the Annual Conference of the
than Hegel's criticism of 'picture thoughts' can be understood as a critique of
College Arts Association in 1994 - although it
'pictures'. We must beware of forgetting a basic allegorical lesson about the should be noted that he endows it with a
reification of language: the need to distinguish 'good literalness' from 'bad doubtful tone: 'A De Manian Art History?'.
literal-mindedness'.91 The approach to the image has to be more tangential 91. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 70.
than head-on. It is, then, perhaps appropriate that- via Proust, Marcel, 92. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Harvard
Swann, Ruskin, and the photographs - de Man approaches Giotto so Univesity Press: Cambridge and London, 1986,
p. 95) ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth
indirectly. And Benjamin, too, identifies as significant the same passages:
(entry for 18 January 1926).
Then I read the lesbian scene from Proust. Asja grasped its savage nihilism: how Proust in a 93. De Man, 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion',
certain fashion ventures into the tidy private chamber within the petit bourgeois that bears the p. 52.
inscription sadism and then mercilessly smashes everything to pieces, so that nothing remains 94. Benjamin, p. 233.
of the untarnished, clear-cut conception of wickedness, but instead within every fracture evil
explicitly shows its true substance - 'humanity', or even 'kindness'. And as I was explaining this
to Asja, it became clear to me how closely this coincided with the thrust of my baroque book.
Just as the previous evening, while reading alone in my room and coming across the
extraordinary passage on Giotto's Caritas, it had become clear to me that Proust was here
developing a conception that corresponds at every point to what I myself have tried to subsume
under the concept of allegory.92
De Man himself remarks on how the issues at the heart of allegory parallel
those in philosophy. As he sees it, philosophical texts articulating 'the furthest-
reaching truths about ourselves and the world' adopt the indirect mode of
allegorical texts and culminate in the same 'inconclus[ion] about their own
intelligibility'.93 For Benjamin, the issues seem to take on a more theological
flavour. Concerned as the latter is with 'the theological essence of the
subjective' and with 'knowledge of evil . . . [that] has no object', however, the
apparent difference in the nature of the difficulties may not be so sharp.94 The
question of negation is at the heart of both. That visual examples function so
prominently perhaps adds another key player to the debate.
Acknowledgements
This essay developedfrom doctoral research under the supervision of Fred Orton at the
University of Leeds. Fred's own work and teaching on allegory have provided an
invaluable intellectual stimulusfor this essay. Chris Riding's discussions were influential
in the early stages of this project. I am grateful to Tim Clarkfor inviting me to speak in
his session 'A de Manian Art History?' at the College Arts Association 82nd Annual
Conference, New York, February 16-18, 1994; this occasion provided aforum in which
to try out some of the ideas contained here. I would like to acknowledge the travel grant
awarded to me by the CAA. The Research Centre for Cultural History and Critical
Theory at the University of Derby provided financial supportfor this project. I wish to
thank the Centre's Director, Dr. Julia Welbourne, for her support. Steve Edwards has
offered significant comments and criticisms on numerous versions of this text. Thanks also
to Fred Schwartzfor his informed and sympathetic editorial work.
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