Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley 9781472543875, 9781441104939, 9781441111807

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Romancing Fascism

Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley Kathleen Kerr-Koch

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Kathleen Kerr-Koch, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. ISBN: 978-1-4411-1180-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kerr-Koch, Kathleen. Romancing fascism : modernity and allegory in Benjamin, De Man, Shelley / by Kathleen Kerr-Koch. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-0493-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Allegory. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) 3. Romanticism. 4. Criticism. 5. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940--Criticism and interpretation. 6. De Man, Paul--Criticism and interpretation. 7. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN56.A5K47 2013 809’.915--dc23 2012046560 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN

Allegory It is a lovely woman, richly dressed, who shares her wineglass with her own long hair; the brothel’s rotgut and the brawls of love have left the marble of her skin unmarred. She flouts Debauchery and flirts with Death, monsters who maim what they do not mow down, and yet their talons have not dared molest the simple majesty of this proud flesh Artemis walking, a sultana prone, she worships pleasure with a Moslem’s faith and summons to her breasts with open arms the race of men enslaved by her warm eyes. Sterile this virgin, yet imperative to the world and its workings what she knows: the body’s beauty is a noble gift which wrests a pardon for all infamy. What is Purgatory, what is Hell to her? When she must go into the Night, her eyes will gaze upon the face of Death without hate, without remorse – as one newborn. Charles Beaudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal Allegory is the armature of modernity.

Walter Benjamin: Central Park

Contents Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: Modernity and the Allegoric

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1 2

7

3 4 5

Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History: Walter Benjamin’s Allegory From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man How to do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley Conclusions: Criticism as Enlightened Deconstruction

Notes Bibliography Index

xi 1

19 81 125 149 167 199 209

Acknowledgements There are so, so many people to thank for helping to bring this project to completion. First thanks is to Professor Christopher Norris for his immense erudition, unwavering support, guidance, commitment and care in matters academic as well as political. Over the years he has taught me the importance of maintaining the integral connection between intellectual life and political praxis, the life of the mind and a world so badly in need of repair. For all of these things, and for his friendship, I am deeply grateful. Secondly, I must thank my family – my parents Doug and Ruth Kerr, my siblings Larry, Diane and Trevor, not to mention my larger extended family – who have supported me in spirit as well as at times financially. Last, but by no means least, thanks to my loving husband Gerhard, who has soldiered me through the years of research, not only cooking meals, buying books, quelling fears, and playing music, but helping me talk through my ideas and translate some difficult German texts.

Preface This book addresses the problem of the critical impasse that exists in literary and philosophical studies over the question of the epistemological and political role of allegory in the context of modernity. Its starting-point was the debate over the afterlife of theory sparked off by the Sokal hoax.1 This hoax seemed to justify the contemptuous dismissal, in a few circles, of some complex thinkers for the reason that they might be disingenuous, ignorant, confused or perhaps even dangerous. Intellectual imposture or irresponsibility have now returned to the fore as issues of urgent concern to philosophers and literary critics. Rhetoric, subsumed in the eighteenth century under the umbrella of aesthetics, but revived in the latter part of the twentieth century as a nucleus of analysis, has understandably become a central focus of debate in this regard. Allegory, in particular, has changed in status from being viewed as merely a worthless and unsubstantial albeit benign distraction, as it was for Coleridge, to being deemed potentially subversive and a threat to the realms of intellectual-moral freedom and clear-headed thought in a rapidly transformative technological modernity. Thus this study takes a wide-ranging approach to the analysis of allegory as it is treated by three controversial writers whose works flank the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the middle and late periods of what we call modernity – Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These three writers were chosen because they have been at some point recuperated for a theory of ‘postmodernism’, a term that for some theorists represents liberal free play, and for others a lack of rigour and a pernicious corruption of thought. As political adversaries these two groups have engendered a robust debate within critical circles; however, this squaring-up has also promoted a departure from a truly comparative approach to thinking about the porosity of boundaries between philosophy and literature which has been a problem since Plato. This book seeks to address that problem by providing a comparative and critical analysis of the different articulations of allegory presented by these three very ‘singular’ thinkers, especially in relation to the way it features in the collision between philosophical, aesthetic and linguistic discourses exemplified in their works. Integral to this is the role that allegory plays in the figuration of time and history in modernity and the question of allegory’s own potentially critical capacity in relation to the political sphere. An implicit three-sided distinction is drawn between allegory as an act of reading which presupposes a horizon of expectation and interpretative integrity, allegory as an extended figure, and modern allegory as a process of graphing, as reconfigured first in Benjamin and then more technically in de Man. In these latter cases it acquires a new kind of materiality as a performative apparatus that inscribes and erases, gives face to and defaces (and thus has the power to materially affect and change) the human sensorium itself.

xii Preface The political and ethical imperative to understand this performativity, which includes relations across various cultural traditions, historical moments and the virtual technological environment itself, occasions the turn to Shelley whose deployment of allegory repeatedly seeks to reinvest it with affirmative power. Accompanying my argument, therefore, is another concern, one that leads me to ask how these three thinkers might be valued in relation to a certain critical lineage. This includes the putative sources of various supposedly irresponsible or pernicious intellectual trends along with the likewise untoward political consequences with which allegory is said to be complicit. One particular line of thought that this book seeks to critically address is that which claims to detect a degenerative trend in critical thinking since the enlightenment, a trend that erupts in irrationalist modes of aesthetic ideology found in fascism and then, ostensibly, in postmodernism. The title of the book Romancing Fascism registers the often presumed antecedent connection between romanticism and irrationalist ideologies. Romanticism is multifaceted and plural but in the most broad brush analysis can be conceptualised as a resistance to the slow but intense social and economic transfigurations endemic to the motions of capitalist modernity which begin in the Renaissance: it was not merely a response to the bourgeois revolution of 1789, though that was a catalyst for some counterrevolutionary versions of romanticism. Löwy and Sayre have argued that the romantic world view or predisposition existed prior to the French Revolution and was continued in modern art forms such as expressionism and surrealism in the works of writers like Thomas Mann, William Butler Yeats, Charles Péguy and Georges Bernanos.2 They have developed a useful typology of Romanticism based on different sorts of responses or reactions to bourgeois capitalism: the romantic restitutive nostalgia for a return to a precapitalist, particularly Medieval past with its feudal bonds, religious communion and love and loyalty to a monarch; the romantic conservative desire to return to the state of evolutionary capitalist development that existed before the French Revolution and the destruction of pre-modern forms; the romantic resigned acceptance of the tragedy of the death of community and the inevitability of industrial, technological and decadent society; the romantic reformist conviction that the transformation of ruling class consciousness and changes in law would ameliorate the excesses of the bourgeoisie in the name of progress; the romantic revolutionary hope, in its many guises, for a non-capitalist, more egalitarian utopian future; and finally the romantic fascistic rejection of capitalism and the monetarism of the city (associated with the Jews) and advancement of the mythic Doric origins of a rural Volksgemeinschaft, the rejection of parliamentary democracy and communism in the promotion of militarism, force (violence) and cruelty in the exaltation of pure irrationalism and the belligerence of instinctual life.3 Typologies act as important heuristic devices, though they are not themselves immune to the dissembling and graphing performativity of allegory, as illustrated in the difficulties that Löwy and Sayer have in pinning down the character of revolutionary romanticism. Nevertheless, one advantage of pluralising the term in this fashion is that it prevents the conflation of romanticism with fascism, meanwhile registering a certain relationship between the two. It also allows for the teasing out and

Preface

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distinction to be made between a tendency towards irrationalism and ‘the rehabilitation of nonrational and/or nonrationalizable behaviors’4 without precluding rational thought. Shelley’s ‘revolutionary’ romanticism exemplifies this tendency in some romantic writers. A second advantage of pluralising romanticism in this fashion is that narratives of regression – in this case the so-called decline in critical thinking – can be challenged as themselves allegories of reading that are grossly and inherently reductive or distorting in their keenness to round up various offenders. Using the work of Paul de Man and Jürgen Habermas, my final chapter suggests a way forward for a discourse caught in the resultant impasse between critical-rationalist and poetic modes. Romancing Fascism argues that intellectual responsibility can only be safeguarded if criticism is mobilised both as a poetic and as a critically enlightened endeavour. In this analysis of allegory as a function of modernity, then, what is made clear is the difficulty, if not impossibility, of definitively determining the genealogical antecedents of intellectual trends, particularly those considered pernicious to clear thinking. In identifying certain problems surrounding the question of intellectual responsibility which penetrate the very heart of the critical endeavour, the book analyses the performativity of allegory as both temporal contingency, as an agent of resistance to all pretences to symbolic truth and as a rhetorical trope that depends on the semblance of common perception. In this context the problem of history becomes one of keeping this semblance of common perception available amidst shifting rhetorics of temporality. Thus, rather than setting critically enlightened and poetic modes of critical practice in irreconcilable opposition, this book concludes by offering an opportunity to consider the benefits of an interlocution between the two.

Introduction: Modernity and the Allegoric In claiming that citations not only legitimate scholarship, but ‘remind us of a former way of posing a question, to prove that an answer that has become classic is no longer satisfactory, that it has itself become historical and demands of us a renewal of the process of question and answer’,1 Hans Robert Jauss pronounces on a key issue in the debates over the concept of modernity: does the turn to language in the arenas of deconstruction and critical theory make history redundant or significant in the formation of theory? In the case of the question of modernity, is an understanding of history necessary for the formulation of a theory of modernity or should ‘the formation of theory reflect on the history of its formation’.2 In Jauss’s view, citations initiate the repetition of the process of question and answer in the light of an historically redundant answer. Following this we might say that when Locke cites the classic Cartesian description of the ‘I’ as ‘res cogitans’, he reissues and historicises the question of subjectivity by indicating the problem of the perpetuity of personal identity when the substance of the thinking thing changes, and posits a new theory in which a natural association of ideas is secured through experience, each idea marked for reference by a word.3 In re-historicising subjectivity, Kant cites both Locke’s ‘noogony’ or ‘sensualised … concepts of the understanding’ and Leibnitz’s ‘intellectualised appearances’4 in proposing a bifurcated ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ ‘I’, and Hegel cites Kant in raising the problem of grounding such a diremptive ‘I’ when he makes it a self-reflexive concrete universal.5 Habermas, reading from a critical distance, regards this dialectical rearticulation of the question of the subject as the main theme running through the philosophical discourse of modernity and thus this renewal of the question of the philosophical ‘I’ becomes more than a response to the redundancy of an earlier description: the repetition is the grounding principle of modernity.6 Thus to Marx’s view that modernity is the constant renewal of the impulse toward change (changing modes of production) and therefore is an (alienating) effect of the dynamics of capital accumulation,7 Norris adds that modernity is to be understood as a turn to subjectivity which starts with Descartes’ quest for knowledge self-evident to reason and secure from all the demons of sceptical doubt: it is invoked to signify the currents of thought that emerged from Kant’s critical revolution in the spheres of epistemology, ethics and aesthetic judgement.8 Matei Calinescu, on the other hand, reads modernity as both unrepeatable sequential historical time which is enlightened and secular and yet unavoidably linked with Christian eschatology as developing industrialisation, and contradictorily, as a self-questioning connected with the death of God, which fractures the ‘human’ with political, linguistic and cultural constructions of subjectivity that compromise any easy faith in progressive teleology.9 And this trend is reinvoked in Peter Osborne’s view of modernity as primarily a temporal concept

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Romancing Fascism

which has nevertheless been made possible because of certain spatial preconditions: these are the unification of the globe through colonial navigation which allows for the thought of history as a whole, and the hierarchical distinction of European from non-European cultures, in which an historical differentiation could be introduced within the present.10 With this the central thematic of modernity becomes space-time configurations and, indeed, for Anthony Giddens, modernity is inherently globalising and therefore requires a conceptual framework of time-space distanciation which draws attention to the complex relations between local involvements and interactions across distance: globalising modernity involves stretching social contexts and regions as they are networked across the surface of the earth.11 The consequences of such stretching, as Arjun Appadurai points out, is a ‘new global cultural economy’ which must be understood as ‘a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’ in which capital, commodities, information, technologies, images and ideologemes, not to mention ethnicities, flow non-isomorphically across borders at great speed, scale and volume.12 The turn to technology leads Andrew Feenberg to define modernity as different from, but inextricably bound to, technology in which technological ‘deworlding’ violently shatters an old world in the process of disclosing a new world.13 The multiple trajectories of these articulations on modernity indicate that the definition itself is a perpetual re-graphing of the term to fit evolving contexts. In each instance there is an attempt to enlarge understanding in keeping with the contemporary moment and without losing the sense of the original concept. The performativity inherent in this process of re-graphing is what we have come to understand, since Walter Benjamin, as integral to the operations of allegory. Far from being simply another trope, allegory is the name we give to the difficult business of linking the temporal and phenomenal realm with the materiality of signification, and its main problematic, especially in an age of plurality and virtuality, is in maintaining a connection with a concrete reality. This is not only a theoretical problem but an epistemological problem, a political problem and ultimately an aesthetic and ethical problem. This book asks two questions: first, what can a comparative study of allegory as it is developed in the works of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man tell us about the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and about criticism itself? Secondly, how is it possible to harness graphing performativity, which is also the performativity of technology, to human interests as against narrow political interests? It begins by staging the context for this project: In May 1940 when the German army invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, a 21-year-old Belgian called Paul de Man fled. He made his way through France with his new wife to the Spanish border where his flight was abruptly abbreviated. De Man was newly matriculated from the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität and though he had worked on the editorial board for a student publication – Cahiers du Libre Examen – which described itself as ‘democratic, anticlerical, antidogmatic, and antifascist’ – his life as a journalist had just begun and he was still nine years away from the beginning of a robust, but eventually controversial, academic career. In June of 1940, a day before the Nazis entered Paris, Walter Benjamin, a 48-year-old



Introduction: Modernity and the Allegoric

3

German-Jewish scholar and journalist, left Paris for Lourdes and then in September made his way to the Spanish border at Portbou. For three years previous to this he had been discussing the significance of the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley with Bertolt Brecht, the affects of which had made their way into his incomplete Passagen-Werk, and his final scholarly endeavour, Theses on the Philosophy of History. Now exiled from his homeland, thanks to his colleagues at the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung he was in possession of a visa for the United States. Benjamin’s arrival at the Spanish border was a good month after de Man had returned to Brussels, so the two could not have unknowingly crossed paths. By the 27th of September Benjamin had committed suicide with morphine and by December de Man was writing nationalistic and sometimes anti-Semitic articles for a cultural column in the Nazi-controlled French-language daily Le Soir and the Flemish journal Het Vlaamsche Land.14 Seven years later de Man escaped the turmoil of post-war Europe to ‘take his chances’ in the United States which led eventually to a prestigious scholarly career. When he died in 1983 his intellectual legacy bore the unmistakable imprint of Walter Benjamin, and latterly, Percy Shelley. Ironically, two years after his death, when his wartime writings were brought to light, de Man was, for many, relegated to the catastrophic wreckage witnessed by Benjamin’s Angel of History. Not unlike the angel, back turned, he was propelled into a future amidst a growing pile of historical debris. And not unlike the poet in Shelley’s Triumph of Life, his readers were left repeatedly questioning ‘Whence camest thou? How did thy course begin … and why?’ At a basic level, all of these writers lived what might be called ‘a life of allegory’. Marjorie Levinson once called Keats’ life, following his own description of Shakespeare, a ‘life of allegory’, by which was meant ‘an adventure in soul-making’.15 This definition certainly applies to all three of these writers; however, this is not the sense meant here. The life of allegory that each of these three lived can be described as a profound break in their experience of nation, narration and temporality itself, an ‘othering’ brought about by their individually situated historical circumstances, that is their ‘situatedness’ within a complex modernity and their attempts at thinking historical truth in that split condition. Hayden White, in his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, asks a question which informed debates in the nineteenth century, namely, ‘[w]hat does it mean to think historically’.16 White’s agenda is to work out the deep structure of the nineteenth-century historical imagination by seeking affinities between historical and philosophical thinkers so as to categorise their narrative structures according to tropes. By contrast the thinkers chosen in this study all address the ‘problem’ of formalism through engaging with the performative power of language which is here analysed through allegory. ‘The very word allegory’, says Gordon Teskey, ‘evokes a schism in consciousness – between a life and a mystery, between the real and the ideal, between a literal tale and its moral – which is repaired, or at least concealed, by imagining a hierarchy on which we ascend toward truth.’17 It is common to describe allegory as an ‘othering’, as the etymology of the word indicates, something that is at odds with total presence,

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inherently aligned with writing rather than speech. The term derives from the Greek agoreuein, which includes the term agora (‘place of assembly’), and thus means to speak openly, publicly, declaratively as in a marketplace, assembly, or forum (agora), a notion that implies communicative transparency, whereby meaning (truth, reality, being) is conveyed through a felicitous and facilitating linguistic channel or represented mimetically. The prefix allo, meaning ‘different’ or ‘other’, has the affect of inverting this meaning as in ‘other than speaking openly, publicly, declaratively’. Angus Fletcher notes that, in fact, allegory is often called ‘inversion’, as for example in Bibliotheca Eliotae: Eliotes Dictionarie (London, 1559) by Thomas Elyot in which the editor Thomas Cooper describes ‘Allegoria’ as ‘a figure called inversion, where it is one in words, and another in sentence or meaning’ and Edward Phillips, in The New World of English Words (4th edition, London 1678) describes allegory as ‘inversion or changing’ and finds that ‘[i]n Rhetorick it is a mysterious saying, wherein there is couched, something that is different from the literal sense’.18 Both Aristotle and Quintillian describe allegory as the rhetorical trope inversion or permutation, which says one thing and means another, and as a trope allegory is often depicted as related to aenigma (riddle), but distinguished from metaphor. Classical allegory is linked to myth, those narratives that function to represent and explain heroic, cosmological and psychic journeys of human experiences along with mysteries: thus allegories, like myths, must be interpreted, often by a priest class. Devices such as dreams, dream-visions, disguises, emblems, conceits, riddling pageants or masques facilitate allegory’s ‘othering’, prohibit objectivity and promote the multiplications of meanings. In this context the classical, rabbinical and patristic traditions of textual exegesis deploy allegoresis as a method of discovering hidden meanings which can be interpreted in support of philosophical or religious doctrine. Teskey’s more modern understanding of allegory, on the other hand, views it as a poetics. The work of allegory is psychological and includes, he says, two kinds of operations: ‘to use meaning as a wedge to split a unity into two things’ and ‘to yoke together heterogeneous things by force of meaning’.19 Thus allegory has the power to create unity through figuration and destroy unity through fragmentation, to give face and, at the same time, to deface. In this sense it carries with it the promise of progressive social transformation in this world, and the perverse power to prevent it. In Shelley’s words, it can be called the Daemon of the world. Indeed, Teskey notes ‘the usefulness of the term allegory may depend on its not having a very precise meaning, allowing it to do psychological work of which we are hardly aware’.20 This disconcerting possibility indicates that there is an imperative to understand its performative power in order to at least limit its possible complicity with irresponsible thinking, some of which is theorised in the name of fascism and, indeed, ‘postmodernism’.21 Fredric Jameson, for example, makes allegory an integral component of postmodernism, which he describes as the return and the revival, if not the reinvention in some expected form, of allegory as such, including the complex theoretical problems of allegorical interpretation. For the displacement of modernism by postmodernism can also be measured and detected in the crisis of the older aesthetic absolute of the Symbol … 22



Introduction: Modernity and the Allegoric

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Allegory in its various guises is for him a new sensitivity to repressed differences, to the heterogeneous and discontinuous, which had been overridden by the hegemony of homogeneous values institutionalised from romanticism to New Criticism. The ‘newer’ allegory consists of mobile ‘horizontal’ relations which produce a more surface-oriented allegorical interpretation ‘as a kind of scanning that, moving back and forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modification of a type … one would be tempted … to characterise as dialectical.’23 Jameson’s interest is in the dynamics of resistance to the hegemonic, the disseminating, dissimulating forces that counteract all pretentions to symbolic coherence. Modern allegory functions as such a resistance by continuing to ‘attach its one-to-one conceptual labels to its objects after the fashion of The Pilgrim’s Progress’ but does so ‘in the conviction that those objects (along with their labels) are now profoundly relational, indeed are themselves constructed by their relations to each other’.24 By contrast, this study seeks to disengage allegory from a theory of postmodernism as such by handling it in the larger context of modernity generally. Teskey points out that there is often a confusion between ‘allegorical interpretation and the making of allegories’ and also confusion about the autonomous power of language and the by no means simple issue of intentionality.25 Allegories, he says, themselves often contain instructions for their own interpretation which distinguishes them from ‘the allegorical’ and allegorical figures existing independently of a ‘comprehensive structure of meaning’.26 Metaphorically, the allegorical work functions both as a labyrinth and as a veil, these being traditional figures of deferral. In Derridean terms, allegory is the logocentric genre par excellence, the genre that depends more explicitly than any other on the notion of a centred structure in which differences infold into the One.27

In the Renaissance the allegorical poet’s primary purpose was to serve and keep intact a truth that he had received under inspiration. Allegory was the rhetorical form most suited to this task, as it could reveal the truth to initiates while at the same time keeping it veiled from those who could not understand, or perhaps accept, this truth.28 Thus it has an affinity with mythology and religion in that it has the power to depict and bring to consciousness the most intimate details of human experience. In this it is connected with a collective unconscious and dreaming, with creativity and with knowledge. In the modern technological context, however, its performative excess also makes it amenable to constant material innovation, and hence the vehicle of commodity fetishism under capitalism. In this context also, allegory has the power to destroy the internal integrity of a particular collective unconscious through the violence of pure performativity, the violence of driving a wedge into the flow of thought, into the human sensorium itself, that is, into the very sensory environment in which experience, signification and interpretation take place. In this it is linked with the limits of knowledge and with death.

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Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion

Modernity as a concept is doubled: on the one hand, it is monologically rational (or rationalising), evolutionary and attached to some notion of progress; on the other hand, it is in conflict with history, bound to ‘recapitulate the break brought about by the past as a continuous renewal’.1 Embedded in the malaise of modernity is an antagonism, or a contradiction between rationalising and disseminating forces, an impasse which is radicalised or exacerbated in late modernity with globalising technologies and increases in speed, often culminating in radical and violent consequences. It is precisely this antagonism that gives semiotic force to the performativity of modern allegory, which in its capacity to foreground the activity of meaning production itself, can flout the critical power of a coherent subject, thwarting attempts to represent history objectively. Much vigilance is required it would seem to forestall the discursive deconstruction of symbolic identities. One could, as Fredric Jameson does, view this condition as signalling the inevitable pre-eminence of the knowledge forms of the proletariat.2 On the other hand, it could also be argued that the disjunction between figuration and inwardness, that is the elimination of the boundary between inwardness or meaning and figuration, the condition produced through the narrative performance of modern allegory, is precisely the kind of instability that is a precondition for forms of modern totalitarianism, the consequences of which can hardly be considered progressive. The horror of Auschwitz in Europe was one such consequence, in whose aftermath, according to Theodor Adorno, Hitler had levied a new categorical imperative upon an enslaved humanity: ‘to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself …’3 This chapter raises the question as to what extent it is possible to isolate this kind of critical thinking from allegorical performativity, that is, to what extent it is possible to honour Adorno’s call for prevention based on the insight of the inner relationship between the restructuring of thought and the shift into action. To what extent is it possible to prevent the romance with fascism. Adorno’s categorical imperative to rearrange thought and action has inspired many attempts to work out the intellectual origins of modernity’s far-right politics of which Auschwitz is arguably the most horrific consequence. Richard Wolin, for example, is one who has also argued that Auschwitz is a direct result of a decline in the rigour of philosophical thinking since the heady days of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Thus, his The Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism employs what Hayden White calls a Romantic form of emplotment4 in a narrative of history involving decline and recovery where the dark

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forces of European nihilism can be, and ultimately are, overcome. Philosophical modernity, that is, enlightenment thought, the conveyer of such progress, is depicted in terms of its fall from a position of transcendence exemplified by the 1789 French Revolution. This fall was facilitated through a counter-enlightenment discourse which would lead ultimately to Goebbels’ edict that ‘[t]he year 1789 is hereby erased from history’.5 Wolin’s historical romanticism, in fact, reverses the prophetic declaration of another more ironic thinker and critic of the French Revolution, Jacob Burckhardt, who in his Weltgeschictlichte Betrachtugen (Reflections on History)6 claims that liberal democracy was a juggernaut potentially bound for disastrous usurpation by, not the old world dynastics, but Gewaltmenschen who would impose a very brutal form of rule.7 By contrast, for Wolin, it was not liberalism that initiated the crisis of civilisation to which Burckhardt prophetically alludes, but the irrationalism of postmodernist thinkers, the direct descendants of the old European counterrevolutionary mandarin caste whom Burckhardt defends (and considers himself to be a part of), who are made responsible for an institutional decline in rigorous thought. Burckhardt’s antiHegelianism appealed to Benjamin, as it did to Nietzsche, who also believed that the past was made up of multiple perspectives and hence multiple truths. From Wolin’s point of view, however, this decline in philosophical thinking was temporary and the ‘fascination with fascism’ with which it was linked and propelled through the academy by the works of such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche himself, not to mention Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Paul de Man, was a ‘juggernaut’ which has ‘run aground’. Heaped together in this detritus are ‘fascism’s literary and philosophical sympathisers’, a very mixed group including Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Carl Schmitt, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ezra Pound, Giovanni Gentile, Filippo Marinetti, Gabriele d’Annunzio, W. B. Yeats and Wyndham Lewis.8 Burckhardt’s closeness to Nietzsche puts him in the downward trajectory that Wolin describes: both subscribe to the view that ‘the rise of democracy had precipitated Athens’ downfall’.9 Having said that, it must also be noted that Burckhardt also plays a substantial role in the formulation of Walter Benjamin’s thinking: his version of cultural history, institutionalised when he was at the University of Berlin in the 1840s, appealed to Benjamin because it synchronically read across a certain period rather than attempted to make causal links between periods. Burckhardt’s perspective was pessimistic rather than progressive, melancholic rather than sanguine: if aesthetic sensibility improved, it did so temporarily. Politics and religion were at bottom authoritarian and engagement with them prevented the pursuit of a style of existence characteristic of ‘old Europe’, ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. Liberalism was the enemy of this world and anathema to a man of culture. Hence he preferred to view history in aesthetic terms: in short, Burckhardt is precisely the kind of quietist that Wolin condemns. What Wolin considers as the widespread jettisoning of reason and the ‘metanarratives of human emancipation’, by which he means the devaluing of enlightenment liberal humanist discourse of ‘rights’, has, for him, proved invalid. Identity politics, he argues, are unsustainable, and the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the



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cases of Bosnia, Rwanda and Algeria give witness to ‘one of the central precepts of political modernity: the formal guarantees of procedural democracy remain an indispensable prerequisite for the values of toleration and mutual recognition to flourish’.10 Contemporary historical events confirm the priority of ‘right’ over ‘good’. Thus in his clear conclusion, recoiling against the declaration in the last line of Heidegger’s ‘The Word of Nietzche: God is Dead’, namely that ‘reason is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought’,11 he calls postmodernists, the anti-enlightenment inheritors of the counterrevolution, not exactly ‘fascists’, but certainly guilty of ‘conceptual confusion and genealogical ignorance’ and unwilling or unable to ‘squarely confront the political and intellectual implications’ of that theoretical perspective.12 Significantly here, the charge of intellectual irresponsibility allows for the reductive sweeping together and dismissal of some very different thinkers. Claims, such as Wolin’s, that there is a clear-cut trajectory from counter-revolution to the rise of intellectual fascism and then postmodernism are, when subjected to close critical scrutiny, difficult to sustain. It might be argued that all truly dialectical thinkers, those that would preserve the realm of analytical freedom, at some point engage with what might be called truly ‘captive’,13 or ‘reckless’,14 or indeed, irresponsible intellectuals in the development of a singular form of thinking. And they often do this at their peril, as in the case of Lukács, who was forced to repudiate History and Class Consciousness because it was considered ‘an expression of tendencies towards “left” intellectual deviation’ which had come from an ‘idealist, an agnostic and a mystic’, someone who was in serious need of ‘self-criticism’.15 This criticism emerged out of a ‘captive’ intellectual context, that of Abram Deborin and Ladislaus Rudas who were committed absolutely to the goals of the Comintern. Lukács would later retaliate in defence of his thesis by arguing that their criticism had not led to progress, but had rather smuggled ‘Menshevik politics into Marxism and Leninism’.16 This retaliation, however, was never published in his lifetime. Moreover, with the discovery of the defence, the image of Lukács as a stalwart party member who ‘placed more value on his political solidarity with the proletariat than on his origins in the bourgeoisie’ which allowed him to tolerate the ‘contradiction between the social influences on his own writing, and the political praxis of the proletariat’,17 becomes problematical. The interpretation of these events is made even more complex given that he does remain in the Party, staunchly promoting the European tradition of realism that extends back to a classical period and which represents an aesthetic arena in which the battle against fascism can conceivably take place. Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Percy Bysshe Shelley – all alienated and all driven to think about the question of progress in modernity’s claim to historical advancement – each formulate a unique critical response to the enlightenment legacy; each has mobilised allegory in the configuration of modern temporality. The strength of critical responses such as these is often muted in Anglo-American critical and cultural theory where fixing labels such as ‘romantic’, ‘modern’, and ‘postmodern’ on writers and thinkers often serves to classify them not only aesthetically, but also politically. A corollary of this is that the left/right political divide is often determined by the value that a particular critic attributes to these labels, and philosophies and critical

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Romancing Fascism

practices can be gathered together in forums in the manner of political parties as when postmodernism is linked with deconstruction and then opposed to modernism and rational thought.18 The effect of this practice is often to destroy the emancipatory power immanent in the complexity of certain individual works. More productively, one might determine patterns of resemblance in these three writers, as well as critical differences, in particular in the unleashings of critical potential which resists enlightenment rationalism, is nevertheless not irrational, but thoroughly dependent upon and enhanced by this resistance. The different spatial orientations which circumscribe the individual temporalities of each of them contribute to their unique conceptual frameworks and the movement of their thought within the larger context of a modernity defined by its accelerating transformation. What all three share is the experience of social turmoil and personal alienation which leads to a confrontation with death and destruction, the key emblems of modernity, and which is brought to understanding through allegory. Each of them can be viewed as presenting obstacles to Wolin’s allegory of decline. For Benjamin, the concept of baroque allegory critically reconfigures enlightenment historicism and acts as a counter to the debilitating effects of models of advancement based on decline, recovery, transcendence and ultimately progress.19 His desire to rethink Western modernity combined with the complexity of his style has led to many inspired appropriations of his work. These appropriations have themselves had to grapple with, and have also been fuelled by, the uneasy complex of theological and materialist aspects of the work. From the beginning Benjamin’s critique stems from what he views as a fundamental and deliberate reification of experience in the Kantian enlightenment model and it is this that he seeks to address in much of his work. Allegory plays a significant role in his thinking in this regard, linked as it is, first, with decay, destruction and death, then later with a neo-Kantian metaphysics and organisation of truth. This form of truth is to be found in the minute particulars of his work: as Howard Caygill says, ‘[a]t its strongest moments’ Benjamin’s thought ‘does not seek truth in completeness, but in the neglected detail and the small nuance’.20 The realm of freedom so important to Kant is replaced with a model of destruction and regeneration which never fully emerges in a totality either in time or at the end of time. In presenting history as ‘now-time’, a ‘weak’ messianism which is ‘the occasion for hope’, Benjamin’s work localises the enlightenment belief in emancipation, meanwhile leaving the question of progress in a state of suspension. Flanking Benjamin on one side is de Man, writing in the mid-twentieth century, for whom allegory is a transformative event that occurs in the process of reading: ‘allegory’, he says, ‘names the rhetorical process by which the literary text moves from a phenomenal world-oriented to a grammatical, language-oriented direction. It thus also names the moment when aesthetic and poetic values part company.’21 De Man’s version of allegory is embedded in his ‘critico-linguistic’ understanding of the imperative to maintain an absolute disjunction between the figural and the literal, something that has the positive political consequence of keeping aesthetics at an absolute remove from literal representation which depends upon a reliable linkage between sign and meaning. Notwithstanding this imperative, as he shows, the act of



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reading itself is a form of allegorisation which takes on a life of its own by virtue of the fact that it must make guesses. The problem is further complicated because when philosophical works are analysed from a critical linguistic perspective, they turn out to depend on tropes to provide cohesion for their arguments. On the other side is Shelley, whose poetics are shaped in the early nineteenth century confidence that mimesis can aesthetically recover a classical idealism, which for him is embodied in the allegorical figure of intellectual beauty, even in the midst of the vivid perception of immanent destruction characteristic of the newly industrialising world, the reorganisation of labour and a reactive and revolutionary Europe: allegory is for him a form of mimetic narrative which functions both in the depiction of aesthetic and intellectual creation and in the representation of material destruction. His understanding of allegory is wedded to his empiricism: from the beginning it is configured through a mind/body dualism. Nevertheless, though Shelley appears to be, to a certain extent, in control of allegory, or in Benjamin’s words ‘rules over allegory’,22 the allegorical contagion which ensues through his reviewers powerfully creates fictions that invert his agency and take on a life of their own. De Man’s reading of The Triumph of Life suggests that Shelley perceived the usurping performative force of the allegorical on the shaping of monumental histories. Shelley, whose writing helped to consolidate Benjamin’s later thinking about allegory, also inspired de Man’s later ‘linguistics of literariness’ – which not only names the ‘irruption or revelation of an “autonomous potential of language” ’ but is also ‘a powerful tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence’.23 De Man’s reading of Shelley shows that though that work aspires to a classical ideal, in fact it is caught between romantic idealism, with its drama of self-identification, and the melancholy and irony of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, which is born out of an apprehension of captivity, the impossibility of transcendence and the inevitability of death. In other words, he hovers between a desired redemption and the clear apprehension of the diremptive character of human existence, between a classical and a baroque sensibility. Consciousness of being caught and hovering is what makes him able to, as Benjamin sees it, maintain a certain affirmative power in his use of allegory, in a way that Baudelaire, temporally separated from Shelley by only a generation, cannot. This accounts for the overt politicisation of his aesthetics, and for what drew his work to Benjamin and appealed to Brecht. De Man’s insights, clearly derived from The Origin of German Tragic Drama, put Shelley in the forefront of understanding the predicament of modernity. In a reading of Shelley’s Triumph of Life he shows precisely how the poem is ultimately bound in an ironic entanglement which precludes continued attempts at formulating a meaningful selfhood that might somehow transcend time, history and ultimately death,24 meanwhile warning that events must be recovered by a non-systematised ‘historical and aesthetic system of recuperation’ that gets repeated even despite this knowledge.25 Wolin’s narrative of modernity’s decline and recovery, derived as it is from Jürgen Habermas’s view of modernity as an ‘unfinished project’, stays poised in a laudable defence of a well-meaning enlightenment political philosophy. The problem is,

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Romancing Fascism

however, that it only achieves its aim through a kind of reductiveness which can often look like a lack of closeness to the thinkers cited as actants in the narrative. This is certainly the case with, among others, de Man, the disparagement of whom, after the revelations of his wartime journalism, has exceeded exponentially the admiration in which he was held before his death. De Manian detractors are plentiful, but in Wolin’s case the unqualified dismissal of de Man is, in my view, curious, since he holds up the thinking of Benjamin – arguably the most important influence on the mature work of de Man26 – as exemplary. He describes Benjamin’s work as ‘difficult to come to terms with’ but nevertheless endowed with ‘a magical quality’ and ‘an originality of focus and vision’ which characteristically altered unrecognisably the intellectual materials that it ingested and then assimilated meanwhile flouting interpretative felicity: Benjamin self-consciously opted for a hermetic and forbidding mode of discourse, further compounding the difficulties of reception by steadfastly refusing in most cases to supply outright the meta-theoretical bases of his conceptual train.27

Wolin’s view of de Man is related to what he reads as the fascistic tendencies of counter-enlightenment thought and the war-time revelations certainly give grist to his mill. Benjamin, it seems on the other hand, can be understood as a magical, profound and visionary thinker precisely because he spent his life overtly critiquing the conceptual infrastructure of fascism (though as we shall see, on very dubious grounds) and tragically ended as one of its lamented victims. A close reading of Benjamin and de Man together indicates that from the beginning de Man is writing with Benjamin in mind in an attempt to recuperate important aspects of his thought while at the same time militating against some of its more dangerous elements. This closeness of de Man’s thinking to that of Benjamin suggests that in his mature work (that is his work after the wartime journalism which in my view must be kept separate from the rest of his oeuvre) would continue the work of dissembling, rather than reinforcing, the infrastructure of fascism. Indeed, as indicated above, it can be argued that de Man’s work carries forward this critique potentiating, but also secularising, Benjamin’s work more explicitly at the level of rhetoric. Thus de Man’s recuperation of Benjamin’s thought is not simply transformative without being critical, for this would be to leave Benjamin monumentalised in the like-manner of Wolin. Many critics have been wary of his messianic redemptive critique even after his conversion to materialism. As Bernd Witte points out, although Lukács leads Benjamin to the path of materialism, methodologically and in the conceptualisation of goals the two are very different: while the former is more scientifically systematic, the latter prefers to ‘win the powers of intoxication for the revolution’.28 This difference between the aesthetic realism of Lukács and the ‘weak’ messianism of Benjamin raises an important issue: in a society which has forfeited tradition and succumbed to commodity excess, realism might be considered a capitulation to dysfunctionalism, which would put Benjamin’s theological and hashish-fired intoxication in a much healthier transformative light.29 Having said that, however, making Lukács the blind one and valorising Benjamin’s insight into the importance of



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13

a more poetic model of critique is a move that must carry with it important qualifications, which Wolin does not entirely address. Benjamin’s possible (blind or flirtatious) implication in the tyrannies of the twentieth century – must be considered in the light of his life-long fascination with some counter-enlightenment, anti-Semitic, clearly ‘reckless’ intellectuals: the cosmology of Ludwig Klages’s, the ‘spleen’ of Baudelaire, the political theology of Carl Schmitt. Fascination for this last, Carl Schmitt – who, along with Martin Heidegger, was considered for a time as one of the leading intellectuals of the Third Reich and was directly responsible for legalising murder for Hitler30– raises a theoretical complication which of course, does not include only Benjamin within its sphere, that is, it raises the question of the very possibility of absolute objectivity in intellectual matters. Not only Benjamin,31 for example, but some members of the Frankfurt School32 found fundamental intellectual resources in Schmitt, a fact that seriously complicates easy critical formulas. As is well known, Horkheimer and Adorno, who were two of the most prominent critics of fascism, when writing Dialectic of the Enlightenment between 1939 and 1944,33 specifically addressed the question of increased barbarism in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. For them, as Bernstein points out, enlightenment from the very beginning is anti-enlightenment; indeed even prior to the commencement of the overt strategies of enlightenment, the myths against which enlightened thinking comported itself were themselves implicated in the strategies of identity and repetition, mastery and domination.34

They argue that reason had become the hegemonic force objectifying and reifying in order to totalise knowledge in the interest of the subject. What were once the dialectically mediated characteristics of the real world and intellectual life, myth and enlightenment had become embroiled in the downward spiral of domination involving external and internal nature and also society. What began as a resistance to the seductions of myth, for them, became rationalisation, and hence itself a new myth. The mastery of nature implicit in this dialectical movement made human beings objects available for exploitation. Fascism produces and inherits from this dialectical progression: it first uses reason to dislodge oppressive myth for the purpose of liberating nature, and then uses liberated nature as a totalising concept which rationalises the objectifying, reifying process: For domination’s bloody purposes the creature is only material. Thus the Führer flaunts his concern for innocents, who are plucked out without merit as others are killed without desert. Nature is filth. Only the devious strength which survives is in the right. But that strength itself is only nature; the whole ingenious machinery of modern industrial society is no more than nature dismembering itself. There is no longer any medium through which this contradiction can find expression. It unfolds with the glum obstinacy of a world from which art, thought and negativity have vanished. Human beings are so radically estranged from themselves and from nature that they know only how to use and harm each other. Each is merely a factor, the subject or object of some praxis, something to be reckoned with or discounted.35

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The terrors of National Socialism are viewed as the inevitable outcome of the splitting of the spheres of external and internal nature for the purposes of empowering the rational subject. To the extent that culture – art and philosophy – preserves a status quo as opposed to orienting itself towards and distinguishing itself from ‘the actual life process of society’, it is mere fetishism, neither authentic nor truthful. In this the very question of enlightenment becomes skewed: cultural criticism is complicit in the resulting degeneration of the human capacity for critical resistance because it too lacks the insight that ‘the reification of life results not from too much enlightenment but from too little’.36 Cultural criticism ‘shares the blindness of its object’ and therefore to think of aesthetics in utopian terms is uncivilised brutality: ‘[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz,’ for Adorno, ‘is barbaric’.37 Identity thinking, or the kind of thinking that assumes the identity of subjects and objects, the existence of the Absolute Idea, refuses the idiosyncratic nature of particulars by too easily subsuming them under the general. Although identity thinking functions pragmatically by providing the means by which particulars are brought under universals, and concepts are referred to objects, the capitalist mode of production prevents concepts linking with the ideal existence of objects. Hence, identity thinking is a false or reified thinking. The culture industry, in the age of monopoly capitalism, promotes this kind of totalising perspective in order to adapt the individual to the real conditions of daily life. For him, ‘serious’ modern art must, if it is to realise it’s truly subversive potential, render correctly the antinomial and contradictory character of the relation between the particular and the general. But it is not only modern art that must realise its subversive potential. All thought – and this includes enlightened thought itself – if it is to claim such a name, must exercise critical self-reflection and be antithetical. The full thrust of Adorno’s theoretical work is that [n]on identity thinking (negative dialectics) resists the compulsion to identification inherent in all conceptual thought by continual self reflection upon the inadequacies of such thought. It thus approaches truth negatively.38

It is precisely this commitment to approaching truth negatively that links Benjamin’s thought with that of Adorno and the Institut für Sozialforschung [Institute for Social Research]. Benjamin’s official connection with the Institute began in 1933 when he was commissioned to write ‘a sociology of French literature’ (subsequently published as ‘On the Present Social Position of the French Writer’) for publication in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the Institute’s journal. But the relationship was fraught with tension not only due to Max Horkheimer’s sometimes uncompromising editing of the work in his desire to placate the New York publishers and the inner circle of colleagues at the Institute, but also because of Benjamin’s ascetic style which attempted to consolidate theology (Judaism) with a materialist historiography. Benjamin’s strategy in this was to refuse to place interpretative demands on his material method. As early as 1927, after having completed a manuscript which described his impression of Moscow (Moscow Diary) in the aftermath of the revolution (and when he was on the threshold of beginning his Passagen-Werk), he wrote from Berlin to Martin Buber describing his method as one in which ‘all factuality is already theory’, that is, that the presentation



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of artefacts would allow them to speak for themselves, without the need for ‘deductive abstraction’ or ‘prognostication’ or ‘even … judgement’, but rather ‘on the basis of economic facts of which few people, even in Russia, have a sufficiently broad grasp’.39 His rationale for this method is thus the sheer impossibility of making programmatic formulas that might predict an essentially undecidable future. Whether the Revolution succeeds or fails, the future will be very different and the past will only be available through the artefacts that remain. Adorno’s impression of this kind of non-interpretative methodology was clear in his scathing response to the completed manuscript of The Arcades Project: I am aware of the ascetic discipline which you impose on yourself to omit everywhere the conclusive theoretical answers to questions, and even make the questions themselves apparent only to initiates. But I wonder whether such an asceticism can be sustained in the face of such a subject and in a context which makes such powerful inner demands. I remember, for example, your essays on Proust and on Surrealism which appeared in Die literatische Welt. But can this method be applied to the complex of the Arcades? Panorama and ‘traces’, flaneur and arcades, modernism and the unchanging, without a theoretical interpretation – is this a ‘material’ which can patiently await interpretation without being consumed by its own aura? Rather, if the pragmatic content of these topics is isolated, does it not conspire in almost demonic fashion against the possibility of its own interpretation?40

This possibility of material being ‘consumed by its own aura’ was certainly a threat endemic to the Weimar Republic and it gave rise in the aftermath of WWI to the conservative revolutionary movement. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, was not itself immune to the persuasions of politically questionable theoreticians, their own flirtation with Carl Schmitt being a case in point. Schmitt, a Catholic constitutional theorist whose promotion of ‘sovereign dictatorship’ over liberal democracy and whose defence of the Weimar constitution (which he, nevertheless, disagreed with on political and theoretical grounds) put him in good stead with the Hindenburg regime, later actively worked to provide the legal justification for Nazi atrocities.41 In his early work Schmitt advocated political Catholicism, and between 1930 and 1932, the years of electoral crisis in Weimar, he provided Hindenburg with legal arguments for the installation of an authoritarian presidential system based on his reading of article 48 of the Weimar constitution. So although he was a conservative thinker and opposed democracy and socialism, he nevertheless defended the Weimar constitution as an ‘absolute constitution’ defined by its principles of liberal democracy which therefore could not be transformed so as to accommodate monarchical or soviet aims. Up until two weeks before the election in 1933, Schmitt acted in defence of the Weimar constitution – perversely rigidly, perhaps to flag up how unworkable democracy was – regarding any decision to give the National Socialists or the Communists equal legal status in the election paramount to cancelling the constitution, something that had to be resisted. He openly regarded the National Socialist party as ‘immature’ and counselled voters not to act foolishly by giving them a majority.42 Despite this early

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commitment, however, three months after the Nazis came to power Schmitt joined the party and proceeded to expertly execute a transition, through legal arguments, to a defence of the party and a reinterpretation of the constitution. From then Schmitt opportunistically defended German fascism, was an outspoken anti-Semite (though in his pre-Nazi days he had many Jewish friends) and exerted influence in his capacity as state councillor in Prussia, professor in Berlin, and as editor of a major legal journal Die deutsche Juristenzeitung. As a member of the Nazi professors’ guild between 1933 and 1934, he organised German jurors and made suggestions about how the German legal order might be reconfigured to fit the needs of an emerging German folk community. He became the Juror of the Third Reich and, one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of Nazi Germany. When the Nazis conducted an investigation into his Weimar past in 1936, however, he voluntarily resigned his roles, though he continued teaching at the University of Berlin until the war ended. After the war he was arrested and detained in Nuremburg by the allies but he was never prosecuted. He never apologised for his contribution to the Nazi regime. He never allowed himself to be de-Nazified.43 Notwithstanding Schmitt’s inherently unsavoury political credentials, in their early writing the Frankfurt School political theorists Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer appropriated his work and integrated it into their own critiques of liberalism. Kirchheimer in a 1928 essay called ‘The Socialist and Bolshevik Theory of the State’, where he lauds Lenin for his unmitigated promotion of struggle, claims that ‘[o]f fundamental importance for every political theory … is to what extent it takes account of, and admits into its texture, the principle of emergency’.44 Neumann more subtly uses Schmitt for the development of a theory of left authoritarianism which has overcome struggle and the need for intervention in a state of emergency: the emergent homogeneous (socialist) community at this stage no longer requires rights either for overcoming ‘friend or foe’ political struggle, or for delimiting the exercise of political authority. Habermas has called the romance with Schmitt amongst his comrades ‘a sin of youth’45 but this dismissal does not register the way in which Kirchheimer and Neumann may have contributed to Schmitt’s ongoing influence: as Horst Bredekamp has pointed out, Schmitt, despite his tainted reputation and prohibition from teaching after the war, remained until his death a continuing ‘oracular’ influence on many intellectuals in Germany and abroad.46 Eventually, Benjamin, Kirchheimer and Neumann, when the political consequences of Schmitt’s work became clear, reverse their early assessments of its value. Nevertheless, these examples do point to the complexity of the intellectual environment in the Weimar years, and also to the impossibility of predicting or even controlling the possible uses that a line of thinking can be put to in life or in texts. De Man’s ‘sins of youth’ may have been less naive, arguably more complex: as the nephew and close relative of the most prominent, and most controversial, socialist thinker in Belgium and leader of the Belgian socialist party in 1939, Hendrik de Man, his young intellectual life was almost certainly influenced by his uncle, and the shifting ground of socialist thought characteristic of the time. Hendrik de Man himself was the subject of much controversy in the years leading up to 1940. Up until that point he was considered ‘a figure comparable to Marx himself ’.47 The extended de Man family



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were part of the Flemish bourgeoisie: established, highly educated, multilingual and cultured. As a socialist, Hendrik was an idealist and critical of Marxism’s definition of socialism in wholly economic terms. His groundbreaking book The Psychology of Socialism argued that Marxist ideology had failed to bear out the predicted proletarian revolution: the presupposed assumption that the socialist movement was inherently democratic was based on a nineteenth-century view of social reality and understanding of human behaviour. The crisis of socialism was witnessed in the two configurations that socialism had taken in the twentieth century: decadent reformist collusion with capitalism in the West and a decadent revolutionary socialism in Russia. As leader of the Belgian Labour party his greatest fear was that the operation of bourgeois democracy would prevent the coming of a true socialism. This fear and his idealism eventually led him to support Leopold II in surrendering to the Nazis. Hendrik de Man issued his first manifesto encouraging co-operation with the Nazis in the Gazette de Charleroi on the 3rd of July, 1940, four months before Paul de Man began writing for Le Soir. Some of the language he used was later reiterated in his nephew’s own wartime journalism. In ‘Manifeste Aux Members Du Parti Ouvrier Belge’48 Hendrik demonstrates his unremitting idealism when he advises the Belgian people not to feel obliged to resist, but to accept, the victorious German occupiers and to recognise the moment as an opportunity for social progress in the knowledge that the dream of democracy was merely a sham justifying a new elite of capitalists and professional politicians powerless to initiate real reform. Social justice, he said, will be able to develop from a system in which the authority of the state is strong enough to undercut the privileges of the propertied classes and to replace unemployment by the universal obligation to work … [E]veryone has been able to see that the superior morale of the German army is due in large part to the greater social unity of the nation and to the resulting prestige of its authorities.49

Hendrik de Man here swaps class struggle for cultural nationalism, a perspective also adopted by his nephew. Paul de Man’s involvement with Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land lasted for two years, between 1940 and 1942 (he later alleged that his resignation was a protest against German control). As Redfield points out, the reviews he wrote during this time were ‘at times naively idealistic about the possibility of cultural renewal in German-dominated Europe; at times visibly engaged in making compromises in the hope of preserving a degree of autonomy’.50 De Man was very likely motivated by his uncle’s idealism, his uncle’s decision to move socialism along a third path, as well as his own opportunistic desire to get on under a new regime meanwhile deliberately infusing his writing with possibilities for interpretative ambivalence. After the war, he was cleared of collaborative culpability (though his uncle was not) and along with some other contemporaries, he made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the publishing industry, before emigrating to America in 1948. Ultimately the question of ‘intellectual recklessness’ is as much a matter of how writers are packaged for consumption, in an afterlife as much as in life. This packaging is normally understood as being based on some rational and symbolic principle of organisation rather than constructions that allegorically shape and give face to a

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profile. Shelley, for example, was considered a truly reckless writer from very early in his career as the reviews of his work during his lifetime and immediately after his death testify. Demonised by the Victorian right-wing press, his views on radical politics and free love were considered destructive to the mores and virtues of Victorian society. His atheism, on the other hand, was considered by many to be pernicious and destructive to human philosophy and indicative of an inner evil. The critical contagion that his poetry inspired, as Wheatley rightly argues, ‘takes on an independent life’.51 Thus his writing had profound consequences for his personal life. On the other hand, distance allows us to read larger and historically different economies of cultural reproduction: his work has been recuperated in different ways at different times, giving his texts a face and figure which is later defaced and disfigured in accordance with the prevailing critical and social hierarchies of particular eras. This process of repeated monumentalisation in Shelley’s case was often itself full of deliberate looting of the work for the purposes of creating an allegory of the life, as when Mary Shelley – for pragmatic purposes which had to do as much with the libel laws of the time as with contemporary tastes52 – etherealised and depoliticised his work in the 1824 Posthumous Poems. The ‘cleaned up’ version appealed to the bourgeois Victorian market meanwhile making it suitable for incorporation into a body of national literature. These political issues may seem remote from the central question of modern allegory as outlined previously; on the other hand, they do raise questions about how truth, cognitive or symbolic, can be ensured in the midst of constantly transforming temporalities and allegorical historiographies.

2

From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History: Walter Benjamin’s Allegory

Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the faces hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity – nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides only in the stations of its decline. The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance.1 Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, Ich kehrte gern zurück, Den blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, Ich hätte wenig Glück.   A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.2

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The above epigraphs, taken from Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama and ‘On the Concept of History’ respectively, represent moments in the trajectory of Benjamin’s investigation into questions about time and history in relation to modernity, from his early period ending with the Origin, to the Theses written just before his suicide in 1940.3 The epigraphs circumscribe his unique contribution to what has been described as the crisis of historical consciousness which began half way through the nineteenth century.4 This contribution, however, is not without commensurate difficulties. According to Hannah Arendt ‘[t]he trouble with everything Benjamin wrote is that it always turned out to be sui generis’.5 He was a writer, she concedes, but by no means a scholar, philologist, theologian, translator, literary critic, literary historian, poet or philosopher, despite having produced works that would qualify under all of these categories. Ernst Bloch described his thought as surrealist philosophy ‘exemplary for its polished montage of fragments held in pluralist suspense and disconnection’ which nevertheless ‘have a destination’.6 Susan Sontag famously proclaimed that his texts ‘had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes, and then came to a timely halt just before potential self destruction’. She called this ‘freeze-frame baroque’.7 He has been called a thinker whose ‘productive confrontation of apparent opposites presupposes a non-psychological conception of character, and a “deconstructed subjectivity’”8 and a theorist who prepared the ground for postmodernism. As these cryptic statements perhaps suggest, Benjamin’s eclectic style of thought demonstrates a unique synthesis of interruption and continuity: it does not conform to standard academic conventions, philosophical or otherwise; it cannot be placed into any one circumscribed conceptual field which might define a single discipline. Reading this style of thought is a matter of rhetorical competency, that is, it is a creative exercise in itself: ‘[t]he general pattern,’ says Samuel Weber, ‘is to take one step forward and the next step back, but slightly to the side, slightly skewed’.9 Despite the convoluted tactics required to access his thought, however, Benjamin’s thinking has made important contributions to a wide variety of fields. Like Nietzsche, Dilthey, Gadamer, and Heidegger, he interrogates the nature of, and presuppositions surrounding, historical thought on modernity, in particular the relationship between time, history and language. He quite explicitly ‘goes in search of a theory of modernity’10: in his early writings he develops the intellectual tools required for the task particularly in relation to the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel, later deploying those tools to represent, among other archaeological artefacts, one of the ‘thresholds’ of the primal dream world of capitalism, that is, the early nineteenth-century arcades of Paris. In his early essays, a central concern is the question of language and experience – and these are from the beginning intertwined – especially as they can be understood through a theological-philosophical-aesthetical lens, and the question of their allegorical transformation/translation under the conditions of modernity. Benjamin’s method is not ‘freiweg’ or ‘amateurhaft’,11 but always dependent on a not-always-specified precursor text. Thus, Benjamin exploits the work of his contemporary theologians, philosophers, theorists and critics – Riegl, Buber, Rosenzweig, Klages, Schmitt, to name a few – reading dialectically and ‘against the grain’ of institutionalised categories in the



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development of a singular approach to the political, historical and aesthetic configuration of modernity. One of his key claims is that, in contrast to the ideology of ‘enlightenment progress’ (in both its right-wing conservative and its left-wing version of ‘progressiveness’) developed on the model of the natural sciences, ‘reading’ art makes available a critical power to conceptualise an alternative kind of historical understanding. In rejecting notions of enlightenment progress, however, Benjamin remains aware of the political and ethical dangers inherent in a metaphysics that tries to depart from a Kantian transcendental mode of critical thinking: rather than retreating into a ‘postmodernism’-like cultural relativism, he argues for ‘the coming philosophy’ which would use the ‘typology of Kantian thought’ to work out ‘the epistemological foundation of a higher concept of experience’.12 Art, for Benjamin, allegorises the tragedy of the temporality and transience of human experience, the ultimate decay of all objects of cultural production. Historical understanding is not contained in narratives about progress imposed from outside, as implied by conventional historicist practice, but elicits, in a complex way, from out of the forms of art themselves. This becomes evident when focus is shifted to marginal historical phenomena, especially art conventionally considered unremarkable, often hybrid, transitional or decadent. What is distinctive and historically important about these art works is that in allegorising transience, they disrupt temporal coherence. In this, allegory is not merely an ambivalent trope, one that ‘others’ the crystal clarity of a declarative statement, but a ‘graphic art’ that carries history through various stages of decline and a dynamic performative which participates in changing modes of human perceptual being. For Benjamin, our ability to discern these changes in perception is not given through the positing of a reflective subject, however, but through language, or rather, his own very specific theory of language, which, like Johann Georg Hamann’s before him, consolidates all forms of human sensibility, such as music, sculpture and painting. As a ‘way of seeing’, a form of expression, a mode of experience, and as a ‘graphic art’, Benjamin’s unique handling of allegory is central to his entire oeuvre, as it is to this interrogation. Buck-Morss has argued that Benjamin ‘redeems’ allegorical practice because ‘[t]he allegorical mode allows [him] to make visibly palpable the experience of a world in fragments, in which the passing of time means not progress but disintegration’.13 Lloyd Spencer argues that, ‘[w]hereas allegory generally sacrifices internal coherence of representation to the marked signification of an “other” order’, Benjamin’s mobilisation of allegory foregrounds ‘modes of allegory which register the dissolution of the stable, hierarchised and meaningful existence which most allegory seems to imply’.14 In fact, Benjamin does distinguish between didactic medieval Christian allegory and modes of modern allegory. And it is his thinking through modern allegory, as a graphing activity embodying and shaping the material of history and functioning dialectically to achieve momentary completion or apotheosis in the move between extremes, that informs the modes of dissolution or destruction that he comes to describe. Benjamin’s understanding of allegory as historical materiality which graphs transience and decay until ‘in the death-signs of the baroque the direction of allegorical reflection is reversed’ and in which ‘on the second part of its wide arc it

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returns to redeem’,15 initially becomes recognisable to him in his earliest essays when he starts thinking about language, that is, before it gets mobilised theoretically in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. This chapter will provide the context for Benjamin’s legacy as regards allegory, which includes, as Jauss points out ‘the insight that brought to light the buried connection between the older tradition of allegory that declined after its last flowering in the baroque, and its reawakening in the Fleurs du Mal’.16 The modern theory of allegory, for Benjamin, links the German Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century, a period of decadence, which carries within itself the intuition that the world of appearances has lost its value, with its re-emerging, in an inverse mode, in another period of decadence, the nineteenth century, with the commoditisation, fetishisation and internalisation of the world of things, as in the work of Baudelaire. Here the movement between the two historical eras is less a trajectory than a process of internalisation and reification in which death plays a key role. The epigraphs that open this chapter exemplify this movement. In the first epigraph, sacred destruction, viewed from the point of view of symbol, carries with it the possibility of the Passion redeeming a ‘transfigured face of nature’. From the secularising perspective of baroque allegory, however, the Passion is historical, ‘of the world’, and allegory reveals the consumptive face of a petrified, primordial history – a death’s head (Totenkopf).17 These two views of destruction, one sacred and one secular, also underpin two views of language, one mimetic and based on the imitation of similarities in nature, which are unified in the cairological18 ‘now-time’ of symbol, and the second semiotic, based on language as a system of signs which diachronically and allegorically depict levels of decline.19 This view of time and history links together the sacred and the secular in a unique way that distinguishes it from the Aristotelian view of time and history as objective, quantitatively measurable and of a duration where moments of time can be seen to connect causally and chronologically. In the second epigraph, Thesis IX in his ‘On the Concept of History’, destruction is again depicted from a sacred and secular perspective, through the allegorical figure of the Angel of History which is based on Paul Klee’s20 1920 painting Angélus Novus.21 Benjamin interprets Klee’s angel as a ‘Jetztzeit’ divine witness to a catastrophic and growing wreckage named progress. Thus this angel is an allegorical figure, but the thesis itself, as Löwy points out,22 can also be read as an allegory of what Benjamin describes in the first epigraph as the ‘facies hippocratica of history as a petrified primordial landscape’.23 Other interpretative possibilities prevail: in his introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, for example, George Steiner links the significance of the angel to Benjamin’s ‘linguistic penetration’ of the differences between the baroque concepts of the written (or hieroglyphic) and spoken word, to the ubiquity of evil in which theatrical utterances are either curses or invocations and the only way to make the perception of hell bearable is through allegory. The book suggests, according to Steiner [t]hat only allegory, in that it makes substance totally significant, totally representative of ulterior meanings, and, therefore, ‘unreal’ in itself, can render bearable



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an authentic perception of the infernal. Through allegory, the Angel, who in Paul Klee’s depiction, Angelus Novus, plays so obsessive a part in Benjamin’s inner existence, can look into the deeps.24

Claiming Benjamin for the left, before the critical establishment – by which he means precisely critics like George Steiner (and Frank Kermode) – could water away his Marxism – Terry Eagleton reads Benjamin’s allegory as signifying in an entirely different way: Allegory … mimes the levelling, equivalencing operations of the commodity but thereby releases a fresh polyvalence of meaning, as the allegorist grubs among the ruins of once integral meanings to permutate them in startling new ways … Like Baudelaire, Benjamin brings the very new into shocking conjunction with the very old, with atavistic memories of a society as yet unmarked by class-division, so that with Paul Klee’s angelus novus he can be blown backwards into the future with his eyes fixed mournfully on the past.25

What is important here is not so much a polemic between theological and materialist perspectives, but the manner in which the angel is made to function in relation to rhetorical operations of allegory: Steiner gives allegory the mystical power of making substance totally representative which allows the angel to see into the depths; Eagleton makes allegory mime and repeat the operations of commodity fetishism which somehow releases new meaning giving the angel the power of historical vision.26 Adorno points out that the genealogy of the painting can be examined in a series of caricatures, produced by Klee, of the Kaiser Wilhelm II depicting him as an inhuman ‘iron-eater’: Angelus Novus is this machine angel which ‘with enigmatic eyes … forces the viewer to ask whether it proclaims complete disaster or the rescue hidden within it’;27 Gershom Scholem, on the other hand, believed the enigmatic angel far surpassed caricature in significance: it was ‘a picture for meditation’ and a ‘memento of a spiritual vocation’. Scholem, who held the painting in trust for a while, had the Angel write a poem to Benjamin describing itself as ‘heaven sent’, half angel, half man, faceless, kept coherent by wonder, ready for ‘turning back’ away from ‘timeless time’ but confident in its role as messenger: unsymbolic, existing as pure meaning. He has the angel say, ‘[y]ou turn the magic ring in vain/I have no sense’.28 Benjamin’s response to Scholem’s giving voice to the angel was polite: ‘the language of angels’, he said, ‘has the disadvantage of our being unable to respond to it’.29 Responding to the language of angels is not possible given that they, according to the Talmud, ‘are born anew every instant in countless numbers’, indeed are ‘created in order to perish and to vanish into the void, once they have sung their hymn in the presence of God’.30 Thus the angel is an allegorical figure, but the meaning of the figure is dependent upon the production of different ‘allegories of reading’, described, as will be seen later, by Paul de Man. The fact that Benjamin’s work has facilitated widespread appropriation both within the political left, but also between the left and the right is an indication of the complexity of his own orientation towards these spheres. For example, some critics consider the central issue to be whether or not Benjamin’s true affinities were theological (Scholem)

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or materialist (Adorno); for others within the left itself the issue is whether or not his work is another apology for that hydra-headed dragon called ‘postmodernism’, or posthistoire, viewed as the latest incarnation of counter-revolutionary conservativism (Habermas), or whether his work can be redeemed for a contemporary critical theory (Löwy). Scholem maintained that Benjamin’s position was ambivalent and that his foray into materialism was a form of self-deception;31 Adorno claimed that his work joined ‘the paradox of the impossible possibility, mysticism and enlightenment’, not through an Hegelian Aufhebung, but through unreserved immersion in ‘the (material) world of multiplicity’.32 Habermas once described his thought as of the kind that flouts our powers of complete conceptual grasp, but nevertheless surges forth in a brief ‘sudden flash’ of historical relevance (like the angels in Talmudic legend who appear, sing praises to God and then pass into nothingness33), as witnessed in the reception of his work in Germany. Given Habermas’s huge contribution to the question of what constitutes an appropriate critical approach to the dilemma of modernity, and given that he will be used in the conclusion to suggest a forward direction for theory, a short review of the argument behind his comments is perhaps in order. As is well known, Habermas views the enlightenment project as unfinished and objects to a new young conservativism linked with aesthetic modernity which presupposes a decentred subjectivity that remains remote from rational cognition and purposiveness. Broadly speaking, with some qualifications, this is the camp into which he places Benjamin. The framework of the argument, as conveyed in ‘Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique’ distinguishes between, indeed opposes, two possible forms of critique, namely ideological critique and redemptive critique, ideological critique being the form that facilitates the overcoming of tradition, while redemptive critique serves only in the end to reinstate it. He begins by challenging the affirmative character of Benjamin’s thought, his desire to ‘bestow upon us the power to shake it [cultural history] off ’, an enterprise that he claims does not engage the problem of the ‘overcoming of culture’.34 He contrasts Benjamin’s short-circuited critique with Herbert Marcuse’s more wholesome critique of ideology: Marcuse recognises that art is false consciousness insofar as it is the beautiful illusion of bourgeois culture split off from the reality of competition and class conflict. By the same token it is also true because it preserves the ideal realm of happiness and contentment that would issue forth with the overcoming of want in material existence under capitalism. The historical project is therefore the overcoming of culture through reconciling art with material reality, and making Beauty the embodiment of the ‘joy of reality’. The reflective nature of Marcuse’s thought is borne out by the fact that he recognises this overcoming in the ‘surrealist praxis’ of French youths in the 1960s as opposed to the fascism of earlier decades. From this perspective, for Habermas, Benjamin’s overcoming of autonomous bourgeois art is not a genuine overcoming. In ‘Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’, Benjamin sees in autonomous art the preserve of a cultic aura extending back to the Renaissance, that can only be dispelled by an explosion of the beautiful illusion, which is both a relinquishing of its purchase on history, and a sacrificing of its status as a work of art to its reception. Juxtaposing painting, which invites



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contemplation, with the constantly changing images of film, which produce shock and heightened ‘presence of mind’ by forbidding the viewer from entering into the flow of his own associations, effectively dispels the bourgeois cultic aura in the affirmative character of art, removes art from the realm of the ideal and politicises it. From this point of view Nazi propaganda is merely the dispelling of the cultic aura in an alternative suggestive resynthesisation. Habermas points out four important differences between Marcuse’s and Benjamin’s critiques: In the first instance, Marcuse’s critique of ideology makes the existence of the ideal, and its contradiction from the real, the impetus for overcoming, anticipating a reconciliation in a revolutionised future, whereas Benjamin’s ‘redemptive critique’ merely describes the factual dissolution of the bourgeois aura in the changed function of art. Secondly, Marcuse chooses as the object of his critique of ideology classic works of art with an affirmative character such as the novel and bourgeois tragic drama, whereas Benjamin chooses non-affirmative works of art like baroque tragic drama for a description of the allegorical ‘the passionate, the oppressed, the unreconciled and the failed (that is the negative)’ or ‘the consciously constructed’ ‘mortification of the works’. Thirdly, whereas Marcuse does not submit the ‘transformation of bourgeois art by the avant-garde’ to a critique of ideology, Benjamin, on the other hand, reconstructs ‘what avant-garde art exposes about bourgeois art in transforming it’. Fourthly, the dissolution of aura brings art into the realm of temporality and closer to the masses, but also makes necessary ‘the constructive use of means for realistic replication’. This leads Habermas to the conclusion that Benjamin’s art criticism is conservative: It aims, to be sure, at the “mortification of the works” (O, p. 182), but the criticism practices this mortification of the art work only to transpose what is worth knowing from the medium of the beautiful into that of the true and thereby to rescue it.35

Behind this notion of rescue is Benjamin’s particular understanding of history as the eternal return of catastrophe in the midst of permanent unbearability whereby every generation has a ‘weak messianic power’, one ‘on which the past has a claim’.36 Habermas’s worry is that a theory without evolutionary direction in both areas of production (say art) and domination (say the state) is delusive: as he says, historical materialism can’t be hidden behind ‘a monk’s cowl’ in the interest of a half-worked out, or deceptive, anti-evolutionarianism.37 Habermas is not a weak reader of Benjamin and it is clear that the ‘monk’s cowl’ approach has rendered Benjamin’s work amenable to widespread appropriation,38 but his work is not, as shall be seen, ‘half-worked out’: it is an anti-evolutionarianism that is theoretically worked through from his earliest to his late work. Michael Löwy takes issue with Habermas’s stance on four grounds: first, in comparing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the most violent in recorded history, there is no tangible evidence of evolution in forms of domination; secondly, Marxism consists of, not only evolutionary theories, but eminent non-evolutionary forms such as Antonio Labriola, Rosa Luxemburg and the Frankfurt School; thirdly, that non-evolutionary theories might not be obscurantist, but cautionary visions

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of the dangers contained in modernity; and finally, all Marxisms, evolutionary or non-evolutionary, critique domination and the Frankfurt School’s own critique of domination was no doubt influenced by Benjamin.39 Thus, Löwy affirms the political value of Benjamin’s thought for critical theory, and claims that however idiosyncratic Benjamin’s style, his work leads to an entirely novel conception of human history.40 While these are credible arguments and supported here, it can’t be forgotten that Habermas is aware of the fact that Benjamin’s thinking emerges partly as a result of a dialectical interlocution with such dubious ‘counter-revolutionary’ figures as Ludwig Klages and Carl Schmitt, in particular Klages’s cosmology and Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, a fact that has been suppressed in very many critical commentaries on his work. And while Benjamin does not handle the works of these writers naively, the question does arise as to whether they are essential to his thought, in particular to his theory of allegory. Having said that, the ‘overcoming’ model of critique that Habermas sanctions (on very sound cognitive grounds) stands by remaining remote from issues related to the autonomous performative power of art, especially as it brings into being (through technē) or materialises images that make history recognisable. Before embarking on an analysis of Benjamin’s presentation of allegory, however, and in order to better understand the consistency of his perspective, it is necessary to place him in a number of relevant contexts. Buck-Morss presents the possibility that Benjamin ‘perceived his own life emblematically, as an allegory for social reality, and sensed keenly that no individual could live a resolved or affirmative existence in a social world that was neither’,41 hence, in her opinion, his own ‘indecision’ with regard to love and indeed politics. Some aspects of his life, however, were carefully contemplated, as with his relation to Judaism, his relation to Kant and Heidegger, his relation to language and his relation to two controversial figures, Carl Schmitt, mentioned earlier, and Ludwig Klages. Each of these aspects of his thinking will be dealt with as a prelude to a presentation of his theory of allegory in its different inflections as depicted in the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel and nineteenth century exemplified in the lyric poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

Benjamin and Judaism For Benjamin, allegory is a form of experience, so placing his own life of allegory in context is a crucial starting-point. Within his own lifetime technology had radically and in some ways violently transformed the perceptions and way of being in the world for western Europeans. When Europe, and particularly Germany, experienced another disruption in temporal coherence in the first decades of the twentieth century, a political and aesthetic disturbance, the Weimar Republic was believed by many to be a rational answer to the threat of cultural decay; however, the ferment of intellectual activity was soon coupled with a violent social atmosphere. This fin de siècle context – violence and a ferment of intellectual activity – is fundamental to the development of Benjamin’s thought and understanding of allegory; his own biopolitical positioning in



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the European context allowed for a particular kind of insight. That is to say, his understanding of allegory emerges out of and is everywhere bound up with his experience of modernity as crisis, which in terms of the very real context of Weimar manifested as social chaos: he will find this crisis recognisable first in the marginalised form of the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel of the Baroque era and again, but differently, in the work of marginalised writers, such the nineteenth-century French writer and poet Charles Baudelaire. It could be argued, following Benjamin’s own thinking, that the images that present themselves in these two historical contexts become legible, could only become legible, at the particular time of the crisis of early twentieth-century Germany. Thus his understanding of allegory emerges within his own existential crisis as a German-Jew, an exile within his own homeland, living through the First World War and its aftermath, in the failed experiment of democratic politics of the Weimar Republic and subsequent rise of National Socialism. Benjamin’s thought is distinctive in terms of its insight and scope; but it also exemplifies and consolidates the turbulent intellectual climate of crisis and radicalism in the Weimar years and it is everywhere concerned with the problem of determining the historical impact of the nineteenth-century perspective on the twentieth, in particular its implication in the rise of fascism. Benjamin was born into an assimilated, secularised, wealthy bourgeois GermanJewish family in 1892. The autobiographical writings produced when he was in his forties indicate an early opulent and privileged life which provided tactile and sensuous memories for his recollection.42 They detail how the sounds and rhythms of childhood in the late nineteenth century in a rapidly industrialising city, Berlin, merged in his memory; his remembrances evoke vestiges of an older, pre-industrialised, form of perception: ‘the rustle of coal falling from scuttle to stove, the pop of the flame igniting in the gas mantle, the clacking of the lamp globe on its brass ring as a vehicle passes, the jingling of a key basket, the bells at the front and back of the staircases, the throb of passing trams, the thud of carpet beating’.43 The regular rhythm of this early experience was supplanted in time by the radical transformation of the city by technology – a metamorphosis that changed the European sensorium itself – and then his exposure to the city as the source of stimulation and erotic pleasure. This reconfiguration of temporality and displacement as a result of technological transformations would later be joined by a more personal displacement, less the modern temporality, and more the tangible reality of flight as he is forced into exile with the rise of National Socialism. George Steiner cites the complexities involved in the emancipation of the German-Jews from the ghetto44 as one of the prerequisites to understanding Benjamin’s thought. Born at the end of the decade in which the Jews had been emancipated in Germany, Benjamin was reared into a new Jewish context which was the direct result of the absorption of enlightenment philosophy into European culture. The Jewish version of the enlightenment, known as Haskala, was promoted in Germany in particular by Moses Mendelssohn who translated the Torah into German and advocated, among other things, integration into European society and more secular studies. The major positive consequence of the secularising impulse of enlightened

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modernity for the Jews was the emergence of a German-Jewish dialogue which produced a culture of German-Jewish Bildung. The attraction of this somewhat lop-sided dialogue (German-Jews alone had to redefine themselves) was, according to George Mosse, the desire to find a personal identity that superseded religion and nation,45 and German-Jewish Bildung was clearly profitably rewarded in the works of important nineteenth-century thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Einstein, to mention only a few. Bertholt Auerbach believed that Bildung, as a force of liberation and inner deliverance, should replace religion for a redefining of an emancipated Jewry.46 So self-assured was this generation of emancipated Jews (which included people like Rosa Luxumberg and Eduard Bernstein) that Ludwig Quessel would declare that ‘[w]ith the beginning of the twentieth century organised political anti-Semitism in Germany has gradually died out’ and that ‘it would not be brought back to life’.47 Quessel’s observation was horribly misconceived in retrospect. The complexities involved in the reception of an emancipated Jewry were as complicated as the experience itself. Leo Strauss, a political philosopher whom Benjamin had some contact with and declared an admiration for,48 describes the dilemma that the notion of Enlightenment progress presents for the Jewish community, a dilemma that emerges long before Mendelssohn in the work of Spinoza. The difference between enlightenment progress or the return to traditional values, on Strauss’s reading, is essentially the difference between the secular and the sacred, between the rejection of prejudice and superstition, ‘barbarism, stupidity, rudeness and extreme scarcity’, a rejection of the suffering embedded in a recollection of the past, in favour of future perfection produced not by God but by human endeavour, and repentance, return, redemption and restoration, that is a return to the beginning, to the perfection of ‘old time’ (presumably preserved in the ghettoes). Strauss credits Spinoza, a Jew himself and an advocate of liberal democracy, with being the first to present political solutions to the problem of the Jews: either political Zionism, or indeed its preferred alternative, assimilationism within a liberal democratic state, rejection of Mosaic Law and the acceptance of state religion.49 This was in keeping with what Norris has described as the imperative to ‘maintain a strict demarcation of realms, with reason allowed its legitimate scope in adjudicating matters of truth’ and therefore not, like Maimonides, reconciling the Bible to reason or vice versa.50 One might say that, much like the pharmakon ‘writing’ in Plato’s Phaedrus, enlightened modernity was a poison inasmuch as it was a cure for the Jews: it ostensibly created the conditions for equality for the Jewish people, but only through the abandonment of the Jewish religion.51 At the beginning of the twentieth century, just before the outbreak of the First World War, the rationalist, universalist and humanist mission or the Bildungsideal represented by Kant, Goethe and Schiller and incorporated into German-Jewish assimilationist sensibility was challenged by a new form of Jewish radicalism which was messianic in form of thought and influenced both secular and religious Jews. Underpinning this new radicalism was a belief in the unmitigated corruption of the world and the need for its destruction in order to bring about a new order. Rabinbach points out that this Jewish messianism involves at least four dimensions: the idea of restoring a past utopia, the content of which is hidden in the textual ruins of this world



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and which requires esoteric intellectualism to reproduce its image for the future; the notion of a redeemed unity and transparency which exists independent of history and will emerge either at the end of history or within history; an apocalypse which disrupts the perceived linear unfolding of events in history; and an ethical ambivalence born out of the combination of profound pessimism about ‘this world’ and hyperbolic hope for the future. Thus messianism requires secret knowledge in order to perceive the evocation of the utopian content in images and other textual materials which ‘demand a special allegorical reading to disclose their message’.52 This allegorical reading produces the utopian vision of wholeness in exilic consciousness and instils hope for its public realisation in an apocalyptic event. Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, Eric Fromm and the early Georg Lukács, all of with whom Benjamin was familiar, embraced messianism of this form. Martin Buber was a key influence for German-Jewish intellectuals of Benjamin’s generation. He had reinterpreted the Hasidic tradition to present a third spiritual way for Jews, beyond the dichotomy of orthodoxy or enlightened reform. He was an activist for Theodore Herzl’s Zionism and in Three Speeches to the Jews53 which he delivered to Bar Kochbans, an influential Zionist organisation founded in Prague University in 1898, he called for an inner transformation and a return to what was ‘primordially Jewish’, criticism and creative renewal as opposed to complacency in the slavish maintenance of institutional norms.54 Kamenetz describes Buber’s Judaism as one of ‘presence’, built on process as opposed to being merely a historical religion.55 Rabinbach dates Benjamin’s ‘first confrontation with the challenge of Buber’s call for self-definition’ to 1912, based on letters between himself and Ludwig Strauss,56 Buber’s son-in-law. Benjamin was supportive of the ‘bringing to consciousness’ of western European Jewry, and agreed that ‘the valuable forces in Jewishness’ would eventually perish with assimilation.57 However, he could not at that point (nor could he ever, though he critically considered the idea) support a Jewish state, not only because it would mean the uneasy unification of two different cultures, eastern and western Jewry, but that he believed the western Jews had an internationalist mission which meant ‘drawing from art Spirit for the life of the epoch’.58 Nevertheless, Buber’s call for a creative renewal of a Judaism critical of the institutionalised ‘enlightened’ form is echoed in the essays written between 1913 and 1915. ‘Experience’, ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’ and ‘The Life of Students’, all written when he was a member of the Freideutsche Jugend and thus while he was still committed to the neo-Kantianism of his mentor Gustav Wyneken, convey intimations of the critique of an older order of enlightened ‘progress’ which will become a formative aspect of his thinking about allegory, both as a vehicle of decline, and as a force for breaking ‘into this world, to lay waste its harmonious structures’.59 Revealed in these essays is a sustaining desire to change the conditions of existence of his own bourgeois world and, most importantly, a desire to theorise a utopian ground which would be the condition of possibility for change. But here we also find a critique of an older order which has lost its former greatness, themes also found in Buber: a critique of the ‘enlightened’ experience of adults whose lives are actually characterised by ‘compromise, impoverishment of ideas, and lack of

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energy’, a meaningless, soulless, anesthetised philistinism, characteristically a life of commonness without an inner relationship with greatness and the inevitability of utter despair when life becomes merely the sum of experience. Youth, for Benjamin, is by contrast ‘the most beautiful, most untouchable, most immediate’.60 It is not hard to imagine that his conviction that experience was a woeful decline into a mundane aggregate of what is common as distinguished from its originary mythical elevation was an early motivation for the exploration of the source of melancholy in German tragic drama, in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and in modernity generally. What is clear in these early essays is that the ability to be responsible, or the ‘ability to respond’ to what he will call the ‘language of angels’ is an all-consuming preoccupation. Here Benjamin theoretically juxtaposes the holistic being of youth endowed with ‘spirit’ with a degenerate reified condition of the ‘assimilated’ adults that surround it. Responsibility, he argues, involves both a creative and a critical imperative of which youth, who do not prostrate themselves in awe before an all-knowing ‘spiritlessness’ (an eternal philistinism assimilated along with enlightenment ideology) are immanently capable: in a line that could have been written by Pope, he says ‘[f]or if he would be critical, then he would have to create as well’.61 In ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’, also written in 1913, there is a lamentation over loss that anticipates the allegorical figure of the angel of history in Thesis IX of ‘On the Concept of History’, mentioned earlier: We never saw the site of the silent struggle our egos waged with our fathers. Now we can see what we unwittingly destroyed and created. Conversation laments lost greatness.62

But we also have in this essay much meditation on dream. An inability to respond is linked to spiritual ruination, something to which humanity has become oblivious, because it exists in a condition of sleep filled with inherited, enslaving and uncomprehended symbolism: with the passing of time human beings have become habituated. Only occasionally, through dream, are these spiritual ruins illuminated. In ‘The Life of Students’, the enlarged version of his acceptance address as president of the Freideutsche Jugend which he gave in May 1914, the loss of the spiritual is related to the oppressive mandarinism of the university and the repressive institutions that it legitimates. He indicates a belief in the need for a radical kind of critical thinking which would resituate ‘the historical significance of student life and the university’ by focusing on ‘the system as a whole’. ‘So long as the preconditions needed for this are absent’, he says, ‘the only possibility is to liberate the future from its deformation in the present by an act of cognition’.63 He describes this task as exclusively that of criticism, the power of which was immanent in the then contemporary student body considered as a unity, that is, as an autonomous value in itself, and not something on the way to adulthood. This kind of criticism distinguishes itself from what he describes as the institutionally controlled ‘critique from outside’.64, 65 We certainly read in this essay the desire for renewal found in Buber’s third way, and the question of Jewishness will deepen over time for Benjamin. In a letter to Ludwig Strauss, dated 21 November 1912 he rejects Zionism and says ‘Jewishness



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is not in any sense an end in itself but the noble bearer and representative of the intellect’.66 This may be taken as evidence of Stéphane Mosès conviction that, unlike Scholem and Rosenzweig, it was not Judaism as religious practice that Benjamin was interested in (though he was interested in its theology), nor was he congenitally drawn to Zionism.67 In 1923, when intellectuals were being isolated, he wrote a Christmas letter to Florens Rang in which he gives an indication of the depth of his examination of the religious aspects of Judaism: he speaks of a time in his childhood at Christmas when the presents were being passed out: ‘I can see myself sitting in that room,’ he says, ‘and I know it was the only time in my life when a religious verse or any religious saying took shape in me, regardless of whether this shape was invisible or only visible for a moment.’68 Benjamin’s Bildung, both German and Jewish, avail him of resources that prevent his falling uncritically into the kind of robust Jewish messianic philosophy advocated by Buber. In 1916 he wrote letters responding to Buber’s request that he collaborate with him on a politically engaged journal called Der Jude. In May he said ‘[t]he problem of the Jewish spirit is one of the most important and persistent objects of my thinking’, but in July he turned down the offer on the basis that the model of committed writing the journal was advocating presumed the power to directly influence action and as such was itself a very precise political tool which was ‘catastrophic’ in its assumption of an objective ‘true absolute’. What interested him more was the kind of objectivity of affect born from the poetic, prophetic, the magical and ‘unmediated’, the mysterious in writing which is not the conveyance of content but the ‘purest disclosure of its [language’s] dignity and its nature’: My concept of objective and, at the same time, highly political style and writing is this: to awaken interest in what was denied to the word; only where this sphere of speechlessness reveals itself in its unutterably pure power can the magic spark leap between the word and the motivating deed, where the unity of these two equally real entities resides. Only the intensive aiming of words into the core of intrinsic silence is truly effective. I do not believe that there is any place where the word would be more distant from the divine than in ‘real’ action. Thus too, it is incapable of leading into the divine in any way other than through itself and its own purity. Understood as an instrument it proliferates.69

This invokes, as will be shown, the theory of language developed in ‘On Language and Language as Such’. Benjamin’s reservations about a committed or overtly politicised journal are related to the contradiction between two aspects of language, that is between its mystical being (the source of its aesthetic and hence critical power) and its mechanistic, pragmatically communicative use value: between its power to radiate ontological truth and its always ‘interested’ ability to represent epistemologically circumscribed knowledge. A letter from 1917 to Scholem indicates the extent to which he sees these dual aspects of language as part and parcel of the agonistics between modern Christians and Jews: they are embedded within these religions in the forms of vulgar anti-Semitism and Zionism. The enmity between Christians and Jews is a textual event which precedes and requires the manifest enmity:

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The articulation of this dichotomous relationship is not, however, a critical judgement against Christianity; the two exist in tandem, as language, with a mystical, magical, aesthetic essence which carries the critical potential to act within its other communicative and utilitarian capacities: this is its fallen condition. Never does Benjamin reject his German (also read Christian) side in favour of his Jewish side; rather he regrets the forced separation of the two, the complicity of silence about that separation within the German community, and the burying alive of its intellectual treasures by virtue of its self-imposed isolation from ‘all other life on earth’. Benjamin’s belief that the past ‘does not consist of crown jewels that belong in a museum, but of something always affected by the present’71 leads him to query how long Germany can exist in this state of suspension and still be thought of as a living entity. This feeds into his intuition that experience is fundamentally linguistic and affects his attitude toward emigration to Palestine. For Benjamin, the authentic expression of his Jewishness would be in the learning of the Hebrew language (which he never manages), however, the question of place is also relevant. Intellectually he resists the idea of emigrating, but is aware that in the Germany of his time German-Jews cannot represent even the best German cause because their status is considered so venal that they are denied authentic representation.72 As Strauss points out, assimilation, rather than having taken care of ‘the Jewish problem’ increased and exacerbated anti-Semitism.73, 74 Thus, Benjamin’s own existential crisis, as a German-Jew and as witness to the ‘death wish’ that seemed to have gripped Germany and isolated it from its living past, coincides with his interest in the images of death that prevail in the seventeenth century. In another letter to Rang, who was a Protestant theologian,75 he asks the question as to why so many medieval images of death emerge and proliferate in Protestant writers of the seventeenth century. What was it about Protestantism at that time that led to the production of such drastic images? This will become a key concern in the development of his thesis in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Again in a letter to Rang he poses what he is at this time conceiving as an historiographical problem in theological terms: … you would circumscribe the continuing dependence on God with the concepts of life and death, as if dying partook of the presence of God and life has fallen prey to the godforsaken. It is more likely that posing the question in this way has led to a genuine area of conflict between Jews and Christians. From a Jewish standpoint, it seems to me unlikely that the Torah could be more easily understood as a mystery of death than as a promise of life.76



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Benjamin never develops this insight in these terms further; however, it can be argued that this fundamental theological difference between Judaism and Christianity, which is the difference between the mystical/eschatological perspective of traditional Judaism and the pragmatic/teleological approach of Protestantism, informs his thinking about allegory as it deepens between the seventeenth century studies and those of the nineteenth-century.

Benjamin, Kant, Heidegger Reckoning with Benjamin’s relation to Kant and to Heidegger are other important co-ordinates in understanding his thought. The critical distance that he erects is contoured differently in relation to each of them and it is within those contours that the possibility of placing Benjamin’s early thought arises. For the most part he holds Kant in high esteem: on 1 December 1920 he announced to Scholem that he had ‘again become a member of the Kant Society’,77 but by 1931 he was lamenting what he called Kant’s ‘feeblemindedness’.78 However, in 1917, defending Kant’s philosophical style from detractors and philistines in another letter to Scholem, he says: ‘[i]t is quite true that art must be subsumed in great scientific creations (the reverse also holds true), and thus it is my conviction that Kant’s prose per se represents a limes of literary prose’.79 He puts Kant in the same camp as Plato, and avers that ‘his system’s typology must last forever’ and with a few revisions it could become doctrinal.80 This clear respect, however, is not replicated in his attitude to his contemporary Martin Heidegger, whom he considered a charlatan and a groveller.81 As early as 30 April 1913, in a letter to Carla Seligson, Benjamin indicates that he is reading Kant’s Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Morals, an event which marks the beginning of a relationship with the philosopher’s thought that is both embracing and crucially critical. In fact, this text, as Wolin points out, informed his own world view at the time and his negative stance towards the question of an explicitly content-driven moral education in the youth movement. The idea of moral action for its own sake, also informs his stand towards overt and directed political commitment.82 And it is precisely the crucial importance of preserving the sphere of the moral imperative, guaranteed through the existence of pure reason, that he struggles with in developing his linguistic philosophy. Benjamin’s critique of Kant, as Howard Caygill has shown, involves the extension and transformation of the concept of experience which emerges in his earliest writings including ‘On Perception’ (1917) and ‘On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy’ (1918). The desire to transform philosophy, to project a ‘coming philosophy’,83 however, manifests much earlier, once again, in ‘The Life of Students’ (1914–15) where he outlines a philosophical-historical task to reveal an ‘immanent state of perfection’, found in products of the creative mind, and to ‘make it visible and dominant in the present’.84 In this vein the coming philosophy, for Benjamin, critically transforms Kant’s transcendental view of experience, by extending it to include the speculative. Kant’s transcendental theory of experience, though directly derived from Locke and

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Leibniz, goes back to Aristotle’s distinction between noiesis and aisthesis, ‘perceiving’ and ‘thinking’, and the problem of the relationship between them. In the historical development of Western philosophy, experience first becomes defined by Aristotle as something that arises from memory of repeated sense perceptions, the particulars of perception, and the source of the universal and its stabilisation in the soul as knowledge.85 When Descartes, in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), gives experience a twofold character, both as produced externally through sources acting on the senses and as produced internally through the mind’s reflection upon itself, he opens up the possibility for understanding experience as not only twofold, but either as being bound together in the production of knowledge (experiences provided by the senses are given as source material for internal reflection) or functioning independently (the data of external experience complements the data of internal experience, the mind’s reflection on itself). The first direction informed the development of Locke and Hume’s philosophies, while the second direction informed the philosophy of Leibniz. Kant’s advance on Locke’s empirical theory of knowledge and Leibniz’s more psychological model is to combine the two and include external sense data as the material basis for reflection with a notion of a priori innate truth, given through internal reflection, as the condition for truths of sense perception. Kant introduces the notion of the ‘transcendental’, a term distinguished from the ‘empirical’, to indicate a form of knowledge that does not presume to know objects in themselves, but only the conditions of possibility for knowing them. Kant’s theory of experience, carefully circumscribed by the limitations of human understanding, is a theory of the experience of nature, as Benjamin points out, and it includes the faculties of intuition, understanding and reason. The ground for any experience whatsoever is receptivity or the openness of the subject to objects that might affect it. Intuition, the unmediated, ‘direct’ realm of sense perception, has a principle of form allowing the mind to apprehend concrete objects. This principle of form includes the two forms of space and time, which are ‘pure’, that is, they exist in the mind as the means by which intuitions are processed and not in space and time itself. Through the faculty of understanding, the appearances that arise in the pure forms of space and time, the concepts of intuitions, are adapted to judgements of quantity, quality, relation and modality and brought under the pure concepts of understanding (consisting of 12 categories) which anticipate and adapt themselves to the condition of appearances in space and time. The relationship between the faculties of intuition and understanding is woven through a process of schematisation. The third faculty is that of reason and this is the realm of freedom which includes God, the world and the soul. It is also the faculty of syllogistic reasoning which allows for the formulation of inferences. In Kant’s model of experience the faculty of reason is entirely independent of the binding conditions which govern the relationship between intuition and understanding. This is the part of the Kantian system that Benjamin would modify by introducing the speculative into the faculties of intuition and understanding which are for Kant strictly circumscribed by the table of judgements and the categories. Kant’s system does account for the speculative, but this is in terms of the metaphysics of nature: in the Critique of Pure Reason philosophy is divided into two



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parts, ‘Transcendental Analytic’ which analyses all the a priori knowledge that is part of the faculty of reason, and ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ which investigates the ‘metaphysics of nature’ and ‘the metaphysics of morals’. The metaphysics of morals is ‘practical’ and is composed of the a priori principles which necessarily determine our actions, while the metaphysics of nature is ‘speculative’ using the principles of pure reason in the theoretical knowledge of things.86 Benjamin’s understanding of the speculative is, however, much broader than Kant’s version. In ‘On Perception’ (1917), which was clearly intended to be expanded to a much larger treatise, Benjamin begins a first section ‘Experience and Knowledge’ with a qualification of his intention which would be to retain Kant’s ‘highest determinates of knowledge’, by which he means the circumscription of knowledge through the categories. Kant had sought to rehabilitate Aristotle’s Categories, which had since Boethius’s translation become increasingly baroque in character, a veritable ‘rhapsody’ founded on ‘ordinary knowledge’ derived through collection rather than reasoned formulation.87 As noted earlier, in doing so Kant first distinguished space and time as ‘pure elementary concepts of sensibility’ and later identified judging as that faculty that could bring the manifold of representations under the unity of thinking in general, through various modifications, synthesising the a priori concepts of understanding and the representation of things. Benjamin’s criticism of Kant’s metaphysics is that it is narrow in scope as compared to earlier thinkers. There are potentially three conceptual meanings for the possibility of metaphysics, according to Benjamin, rather than the two that Kant acknowledges. For Kant, metaphysics can be transcendent or transcendental. Transcendent metaphysics are founded on principles which ‘profess to pass beyond the limits of experience, consist of the objective employment of the pure concepts of reason’ and are ‘incapable of ever furnishing a cognition of the object’ but are nevertheless useful ‘once reason advances beyond pursuit of understanding’; transcendental metaphysics, on the other hand, affords immanent principles ‘whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience’. For Benjamin, what Kant refuses is a metaphysics that would deduce the world ‘from the supreme principle or nexus of knowledge – in other words, the concept of “speculative knowledge” in the precise sense of the term’.88 Whereas earlier thinkers sought to work out an exact connection between experience and knowledge, Kant, in the interest of keeping concepts of reason and understanding limited in their scope to actual intuition, and guaranteeing the integrity of moral knowledge, seeks to disrupt this linkage at every stage of his system: making the validity of the categories dependent on space and time, Kant assumes ‘reason a priori’ and, thus, his metaphysics relate entirely to the advancement of pure natural science. ‘Knowledge’, says Benjamin, ‘declares itself the system of nature’ and then ‘goes on to explore what belongs to the concept of the existence of things in general, or particular things.’ The problem with this, for Benjamin, is that this metaphysics of nature can easily be set up as a structure into which the objects of nature are then made to fit, effectively collapsing the experience of nature into the metaphysics of nature and voiding both knowledge and ethics. Benjamin recognises that this collapse is avoided with the pure forms of space and time which subvert a firm epistemological core to which experience could

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be uncritically attached, but that this then left Kant with the problem of a lack of basis for the a posteriori continuity of knowledge and experience which the science of a priori sensibility (Transcendental Aesthetic) is set up to address. For Benjamin, what enlightenment thinking had eliminated was the exalted view of experience as connected with the divine and what he calls ‘the necessity of the world’. In an entirely contingent world deducibility is no longer a philosophical problem. Benjamin wants to resurrect divine deducibility without reintroducing a conflation of metaphysics and experience (thus preserving an ethical sphere) and his solution is to introduce his model of language as a means of separating and uniting the two conceptual realms. This leads to a new definition of philosophy itself: ‘Philosophy is absolute experience deduced in a systematic, symbolic framework as language’89 and a unique theory of language, as will be shown shortly. Benjamin’s relationship to Heidegger has been a matter of much dispute since Hannah Arendt famously positioned the two thinkers in the same camp in her introduction to Illuminations.90 There are some links: Lucien Goldmann has argued, for example, that Heidegger was inspired by Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness,91 the very text that redirected Benjamin’s own thinking after he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. However, Benjamin’s ‘critical conception of temporality’, as Löwy points out, was developed between the years 1915 and 1925, which precedes Heidegger’s publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927.92 The year Benjamin wrote the preliminary studies to his Origin of German Tragic Drama, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ and ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, was in fact 1916, the year that Heidegger also published ‘The Concept of Time in the Science of History’. In this essay Heidegger distinguishes between the concept of time as it is understood in the natural sciences and as it is understood in the science of history. The science of history is an ‘objectification of the human spirit’, that is, it is about the creation and actualisation, through development, transformation and reorganisation over time, of a multiform culture consisting of human mental and physical achievements acting in unison with the state: he says that [t]his objectification of the spirit that actualises itself in the course of time is of interest to the historian not in its entirety at each particular time, as though the historian wanted in each case to record everything that in any sense happened at that time. It has been said that it is only what is historically effective that interests the historian. Eduard Meyer, who has given this qualification, elaborates on it and correctly explains it as follows: ‘The selection depends on the historical interest the present has in some effect, in the result of a development’.93

Benjamin’s response was worked out in the early essays and remarked upon in his letter to Gershom Scholem where he calls the composition ‘[a]n awful piece of work, which you might, however, want to glance at, if only to confirm my suspicion, i.e. that not only what the author says about historical time (and which I am able to judge) is nonsense, but that his statements on mechanical time are, as I suspect, also askew’.94 Although Benjamin and Heidegger deploy a similar vocabulary in relation to art, as Christopher Long has shown, the connections and differences, particularly



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the political differences, between the theoretical thinking of the two can be worked out when ‘Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’ is read alongside Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’.95 Whereas in Benjamin’s thinking, the decay of the aura of the work of art is emancipatory in that it challenges the aestheticising impulses of Fascist politics, for Heidegger aletheia concretises a relation to the origin which is characteristic of the Germans. These two essays were produced initially in 1935 (Benjamin’s essay goes through three versions, 1935, 1936 and 1939). At the outset Benjamin’s essay states a political purpose in introducing new concepts that are ‘completely useless for the purpose of fascism’ and equally ‘useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art’.96 The advent of modern forms of technological reproducibility since 1900, most particularly photography, has had the effect of overriding the authority and authenticity of the work of art, its aura, that is, its secularised ritualistic value, or beauty. This includes its unique situatedness in time and place as well as its history as an object including ownership, through processes that allow for multiplication and the presentation of different perspectives in different contexts, including that of the immediacy of the consumer. The impact that photography had on this ritualised art was tangible in that art recoiled into a philosophy of l’art pour l’art, forfeiting its social and representational function – the unity of the world in the perception of beauty, a function that had prevailed since the Renaissance – for political praxis. Thus reproducibility emancipates art from its oppressive ritualistic function, and in the process is transformed in its function. Film is a most powerful example of a process that can radically modify human perception. In this Benjamin combines his early insights into the medium of human perception or being, which is linguistic, and his later inclusion of materialist historiography, into that medium. The social basis of the decay of the aura is connected with the desire of the masses to decrease the distance ‘spatially and humanly’ between themselves and things and equally their desire to surmount or overcome each thing’s uniqueness. So whereas the image retains uniqueness and permanence, the reproduction of the image is transitory and repeatable. Reproducibility is an ‘alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses with reality’.97 This alignment is not, however, an intransigent fixity which subsumes subjectivity in the crowd: the decay of the aura is not complete so it retains some of its cult value that links it with tradition, and this is where the critical potential of reproducibility resides. Benjamin identifies two types of reception for any work of art, cult and exhibition: in the context of its cult value, something Benjamin would call in another context its linguistic being, the work exists as a magical resonance available for the spirits or initiates; with reproducibility it becomes available for reception by different people in a myriad of contexts. This shift from cult value to exhibition value transforms the nature of art itself: it becomes no longer a tool for contemplation, something magical, but a construct – film and photography are the primary mechanisms here – with a different function. This drift toward exhibition value, however, does not entirely eliminate the cult value. Benjamin uses the example of images of human expressions which summon back at the viewer to be captured in what he elsewhere calls the dialectical image. What Benjamin describes here as the move from the melancholy

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of cult reception to the functionalism of exhibition reception is also an allegorical move, ‘a sock turned inside out’, as when the human is eliminated from the scene in Atget’s early twentieth-century photographs of empty streets in Paris. Such images acquire an autonomy and historical significance that supersedes the cult value as they become part of a political and historical process, as when, for example, photographs are taken of crime scenes. These alien images create anxiety and require clues to their approach: in illustrated magazines, titles don’t merely name, but give instructions for reading. With moving images the imperative to interpret becomes even more complex as each single image is read in the context of all preceding images. In fact photography on Benjamin’s model is a form of ‘othering’ par excellence: it maintains a connection with a dying aura whilst it brings into being a new form of perception, precisely the mode of motion indicative of the modern allegory portrayed, as shall be seen, in the Trauerspiel study. In addition film is absorbed by what is often a collective subject as when they are viewed in the public context of the cinema. Cinematography uses techniques that produce critical subjects by virtue of their ability to create ‘shock effects’ which must be negotiated and managed by the viewing subjects; they create heightened awareness, precisely the state of mind required in the modern world. Cinematography abolishes the mesmerising enchantment of the art, produces a ‘distracted’ state of mind capable of criticism. Long describes this critical state as the emergence of … a liberating play between the subject and object in which neither is able to dominate the other. Deauratized art not only establishes this liberating play, but also, because it habituates us to the uncertainty of this play, it assuages the very desire to dominate. The ability to exist in the midst of this sort of uncertainty and to take part in its powerful play, is a great threat to all authoritarian politics.98

This new critical potential coincides with increases in both the ‘formation of masses’ and the ‘proletarianization of modern man’; however, this is not to say that fascism therefore cannot find a way of hijacking film for its own purposes: ‘[i]t sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights’.99 Benjamin concludes with the formula that l’art pour l’art has led to the aestheticisation of politics in Futurism which can only ‘culminate in war’. The essay concludes with the disturbing consequences of the change in the human sensorium and of art’s turn to war: ‘[humanity’s] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticising of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicising art.’100 By contrast, Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art makes great claims for the work of art as a source of ‘revealing’ of the truth of being, of alētheia, and it aspires to a profound essentialism that recruits the work of art for an argument securing the historical and authentic existence of a people. The work of art does not exist outside of the ‘unconcealment of beings as beings’: Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance – as this being of truth in the



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work and as the work – is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to truth’s propriative event. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object. The beautiful does lie in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the beingness of beings.101

In this way it also acts as a counter to the other form of technē called technology whose ‘unfolding … threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing reserve’.102

Language, Translation, Allegory Georg Lukács notes that ‘the spirit of allegory manifests itself quite unambiguously both in the theory and the practice of the modernist avant-garde’ and that Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama ‘constructs a bold theory to show that allegory is the style most genuinely suited to the sentiments, ideas and experience of the modern world’.103 Not only does this remark link allegory intimately to modern aesthetics, but it marks out Benjamin’s work on allegory as distinctive in this regard. Benjamin’s thinking has inspired a mass of research on the subject, but a good majority of this research places allegory in its opposition to the romantic symbol, which became canonically defined by Goethe as ‘the universal, not as a dream or shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the inscrutable’ where ‘the idea remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image, and even if expressed in all languages would still remain inexpressible’.104. Halmi has argued that the concept of the romantic symbol exemplified by Goethe and articulated by numerous writers in the period 1770 and 1830 in both Germanistik and British literary history was not consistently theorised and that it emerged through historical necessity in theological, philosophical, mythological discourses, and not always in opposition to its supposed antithesis, allegory. He uses Benjamin as a critical support in this book and to some effect; however, the argument he makes is already assumed in Benjamin’s work. Although Benjamin sets allegory in opposition to symbol – indeed neither does he discount symbol out of hand in the Origin of German Tragic Drama – it is not only symbol in the end, but ‘pure language’, from which allegory is to be distinguished. Benjamin’s view of allegory is cast in a different light by different commentators, often in relation to when they view it as becoming important to his thinking. Bainard Cowen, for example, cites the 1923 announcement of an intention to work out a ‘theory of allegory’ as formative, and goes on to argue that in contrast to the selfsufficiency of the experiential attributed to the symbol by the German Romantics, it is allegory, that is for Benjamin ‘pre-eminently a kind of experience’, not one that ‘assumed the meaning into its hidden … wooded interior’,105 but one marked by an intuition of transitoriness, impermanence and mortality. Thus allegory has a double role of performatively converting ‘things into signs’ and, equally, becoming the content of those signs.106 Cowan is right to define Benjamin’s understanding of allegory as a

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form of experience, but he is not inclusive enough in what that experience entails. The argument here is that Benjamin’s view of allegory is not merely a product of an intention to produce a theory of allegory, though it does become so after a point, but that it is integral to his understanding of linguistic experience which he begins formulating in his earliest essays, ‘Experience’ (1913), ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’ (1914), ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’ (1915), ‘The Life of Students’ (1915) and gives formal shape to in ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ (1916), ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ (1916), ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923) and Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924, published 1928) and then repositions his thinking with ‘Doctrine of the Similar’ (1933), condensed in ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933) and expanded in ‘Problems in the Sociology of Language’ (1935). Although linguistic experience is given specific shape as a theory of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin’s persistent penetration of its operations, starts early and deepens gradually culminating in his last works ‘On the Concept of History’ and The Arcades Project, particularly in work on Baudelaire. The axis upon which all of Benjamin’s thinking must be balanced is his unique formulation of what he calls ‘pure language’, the primal ground which is destroyed with the historical emergences of human structures of linguistic experience. Central to Benjamin’s theory of linguistic experience is the question of translation, and indeed, as Düttmann rightly quotes from ‘The Task of the Translator’, Benjamin finds it necessary to ‘root the concept of translation in the deepest layers of language’.107 Thus, in this way his understanding of linguistic experience, translation and allegory are inextricably bound together in his thinking about modernity. ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ was written in 1916, the same year that Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was published, and although he did not read it until much later, his own essay can be viewed as an ‘against the grain’ reading of the structuralist linguistic model put forward in that publication. The philosopher of language actually cited and engaged with is J. G. Hamann who had worked to ‘purify philosophy’, in particular the enlightenment philosophy typical of his friend Kant in its tendency toward ‘prosopopoeia’ in philosophical reflection. For Hamann the true nature of language was ‘poetic’ rather than passive representation, but it was not expressively emotive in contrast to being purely rational either: it consisted of our reflection, the world, each other and God in a mediated relationship. By contrast, in Benjamin’s essay two models of language are presented, one positioned before the Fall and the other positioned after the Fall when human language as a system of signification emerges, the ‘bourgeois view of language’ which Saussure’s model exemplifies. It is not ‘conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains’, he says, ‘that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by convention’.108 Thus Benjamin formulates his theory of language on the bases of the first, second, third and eleventh chapters of Genesis; however, this utilisation of the biblical text is not for hermeneutical purposes but in order to discover what it communicates ‘with regard to the nature of language’.109 This is an important starting-point, because the root of this thinking about language is a distinction between language as a vehicle for communicating a message and language communicating its ‘being’.



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Benjamin avers that all human mental expressions such as music, sculpture, religion, art, poetry and even justice, technology and all inanimate things are languages, not by virtue of their different performative specialisations, or what they communicate through language, but by virtue of ‘the tendency’ in each of these ‘towards the communication of the contents of the mind’.110 The aggregate of these languages constitutes the contents of the mind and its expression is ‘classed as language’: ‘expression by its whole innermost nature is certainly to be understood only as language’.111 This view is distinguishable from Saussure’s theory of ‘langage’ which designates a metalinguistic level of system in a theory of signs. For Saussure individual languages re-present system in langue, which is distinguished from parole or the realisation of the system’s potential in individual speech acts. Systems consist of signs which are comprised of two psychological components, a sound image, which is arbitrary in that it is a tacit agreement historically embedded in a community of language users, and a concept, which is cognitive and ostensibly fixed in all systems. Benjamin claims that the problem with linguistic theory is that it can’t account for the ‘immediacy’ or the ‘magic’ and thus the ‘infiniteness’ of language, ‘its own incommensurability, uniquely constituted infinity’ which ‘defines its frontier’.112 The distinction between mental and linguistic entities is recognisably the starting-point for any theory of language as communication, that is as a system of signs which allow for the production of communicable meaning. However, his interest is not in communication, but in the ontology of mental/linguistic entities, that is language as medium. The equation of linguistic and mental essence is not to be viewed as a conflation, the dangers of which he is perfectly aware. Tumbling into the abyss of relativism is clearly a possibility; however, the challenge he sets up is described as a kind of suspension: the ‘task’ of linguistic theory is to ‘survive suspended precisely over this abyss’. The suspended mental/linguistic entity he describes is analogous to the paradox of the logos: ‘God and the Logos are not two beings, and yet they are not simply identical.’113 ‘Task’ is a term that Benjamin uses often and it takes the place of the identity of a subject or world view of a creator or speaker: it is indifferent to the reader or receiver. In ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’ the poetic ‘task’, which is not immanent in the poem itself but in ‘the unique sphere in which the task and the precondition of the poem lie’, is distinguished from the way in which the poet fulfils the task, in other words from any form of artistic agency outside: ‘the task is … to be understood as the precondition of the poem, as the intellectual-perceptual [geistig-anschaulich] structure of the world to which the poem bears witness’.114 The sphere of the task is this mental/ linguistic medium which communicates itself, its own being, not a message; it is not a conduit for communicating intentional content by a speaker through language but rather a medium in which mental being is communicated in linguistic being. The ‘task’ of man is to receive ‘the unspoken nameless language of things and convert[ing] it by name into sounds’.115 Like the linguistic being of things, the linguistic being of man is language which he communicates by naming things, thus his language is a ‘naming language’ which is to be distinguished from ‘language as such’ or the mental being of man: ‘[t]he linguistic being of man is to name things’. Other things communicate themselves to man for naming; in naming, man communicates himself.

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Benjamin emphasises that this communication is not ‘by’ names, where ‘the means of communication is the word, its object factual, and its addressee a human being’, for this is a bourgeois version of language. For Benjamin communication is ‘in’ names, which presupposes another conception of language which ‘knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: ‘in the name, the mental being of man communicates itself to God’. The status of the name, ‘its incomparable high meaning’ is paramount here: ‘it is the innermost nature of language itself ’ and ‘that through which, and in which, language communicates itself absolutely’. Name as the heritage of human language therefore vouches for the fact that language as such is the mental being of man; and only for this reason is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities, communicable without residue. On this is founded the difference between human languages and the language of things.116

As namer, the mental being of man is language, therefore he cannot communicate himself; rather his linguistic being communicates ‘in the name’ and it is in the name that ‘pure language’ speaks and since all things communicate through language and therefore through man, ‘God’s creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.’117 In the metaphysics of language the inability to be embraced by any higher category leads to a graduation of all mental and linguistic being, by being itself, and this leads to, in linguistic philosophy and the philosophy of religion, the concept of revelation. The book in which revelation is manifest is the Bible and Benjamin turns to this text to begin thinking a linguistic theory based on translation, which he says must be founded ‘at the deepest level of linguistic theory, for it is much too far-reaching and powerful to be treated in any way as an afterthought’.118 The story of creation is given in two versions in Genesis: in the first version man acquires life, mind and language when God breathes His breath into him; in the second version God ‘speaks’ all of creation into existence including man in His own image and endows man with the ‘gift of language’, or language which is set free in man. In this second version a new order of language comes into existence. The first story can be related to the ‘absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word’, whereas in the second the word is a ‘reflection’ of word in name and the ‘infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytic in nature’.119 From this disjunctive creation story Benjamin produces his theory of translation in which ‘the creative infinity of the divine word’ found in the language of things is transformed into the more limited language of man. This transformation is performatively continuous where the nameless is translated into the name as suggested in the first story, but the mute is translated into the sonic as in the second story. The ‘task’ of man is naming the mute communicability of things, but this task would be impossible if the two languages, the magic communion in the communicability in things and the ‘language of knowledge and name in blissful mind’ were not somehow united in the creative word of God.120 The Fall from this paradisiacal state occurs with ‘knowledge of good and evil’ which



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is the abandonment of ‘name’, or ‘knowledge from outside’, ‘the uncreated imitation of the creative word’ or the ‘birth of the human word’. This, it can be argued, is also the birth of allegory in Benjamin’s thinking. The human word is parodic, magical but not in the sense of divine and blissful communion, and what was once the divine word becomes the judging word whose ‘immutable law’ is guilt, to which the ‘prattling’ sinner is subjected for ‘purification and elevation’. With judgement comes abstraction and the Tree of Knowledge is the ‘emblem of judgement over the questioner’, an irony marking ‘the mythic origin of law’.121 The appearance of natural things is also changed with the birth of the human word, judgement, guilt, law and abstraction: whereas nature was once blissfully mute, it is now mournful and mute. Nature mourns because she is mute, that is, outside of the name, but equally the sadness of nature makes her mute. She is sad because after the Fall she is subject to the hundreds of names of the languages of man and thus to what Benjamin calls ‘overnaming’. Overnaming as the linguistic being of melancholy points to another curious relation of language: the overprecision that obtains in the tragic relationship between the languages of human speakers.122

Thus, fallen language, that human language which seeks to communicate political/ ideological/historical/philosophical content, differs from true language which has vestiges in art. Art translates the name languages of man and things into ‘an infinitely higher language’. But if translation resides at the deepest level of language, the doctrine of signs is related to the language of art at its deepest level. The doctrine of signs is absolutely necessary because the ‘relation between language and sign is original and fundamental’. Benjamin concludes by adding another antithesis to his theory: Language is in every case, not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the non-communicable. This symbolic side of language is connected to its relations to signs, but extends more widely – for example in certain respects to name and judgement. These have not only a communicating function, but most probably also a closely connected symbolic function …123

We are now in a position to understand the remark that Benjamin makes in ‘The Task of the Translator’, that is, ‘[i]n the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful … No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience.’124 In keeping with his formulation of ‘pure’ communicability which it is the task of man to translate in the name, translation of the work of art should not intend the communication of a message (this is bad translation) to a reader. The ‘message’ of the original is inessential; translation is described as a form, therefore translatability must be an essential element of certain works of art. The connection between the original and the translation is in the original’s translatability, that ‘a special significance inherent in the original manifests in itself in its translatability’.125 The relationship between the original and the translation is not based on representational or cognitive correspondence, but on what he calls the afterlife of the original: just as the communicability of the thing is raised in the

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act of naming, so the translatability of the original work of art is given to the translation and raised up to a historical ‘stage of continued life’, an afterlife. The translation owes its existence to the original, and ‘ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another’. For Benjamin, the afterlife is not an objective cognition but ‘a transformation and renewal of something living’ in which ‘the original undergoes a change’. This change involves a maturing process: ‘[f]or just as the tenor and the significance of great works of literature undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the mother tongue of the translator is transformed as well’.126 Translation is to be understood as an ontological transformation rather than a mathematical exercise which equates one system with another, in fact, it is a literary form itself with the priestly mission of ‘watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own’’127 Translation, therefore, works in the interests of ‘pure language’ where what lies at the origin of all languages cannot be equated with representational correspondences, but rather ‘intentional’ correspondences. Intentionality is here understood as a concept which can be inflected as ‘what is meant’ and also ‘the way of meaning it’ which will deliver sameness and differences. The example he uses is pain/Brot: in Saussurean terms we would say that the signifiers pain and Brot are tied to the same signifier, a flour-based baked food substance, light brown to black in colour. However, if analysis is shifted to the way the two terms signify in French and in German languages and cultures, then their meanings are mutually exclusive. At this level of intentionality the act of translation supplements both the host and the target language: ‘[e]ven though the way of meaning in these two words is in conflict, it supplements itself in each of the two languages from which the words are derived’.128 Translation becomes the means, ‘the performative mechanism’ by which, in a fallen world, pure language can be re-obtained. Languages which are not translated remain in permanent flux; the more languages are translated, the sooner they emerge ‘as the pure language from the harmony of all the various ways of meaning’.129 Translation, then carries in itself the ‘fire’ of revelation, a revelation that is hidden in languages and which translation propels language towards. But here Benjamin distinguishes translation from art: Although translation, unlike art, cannot claim permanence for its products, its goal is undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation. In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air … 130

This rise is temporary, and does not occur in all aspects of the work, but it is directed toward a predestined harmonious totality, ‘a reconciliation and fulfilment of languages’ which is otherwise unavailable. What enters this region is not language or for that matter the translation itself, but that in translation which will bear no more translation. This idealisation of translation, however, goes hand in hand with the impossibility of translation based on the difference in the relationship between form and content in the original and in the translation. In the original the relationship between form and content is an integral unity; however, the translation contains no such unity and hence it must envelop its content, says Benjamin, ‘like a royal robe with ample folds’.131 This



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unique intention produces an irony in translation which is that the enveloping activity which raises the translation in the direction of pure language, in fact is more definitively concretising than, say, criticism or interpretation, because it cannot hitherto be displaced. The irony of translation is that the translation is more definitive than the original. For Benjamin, the Aufhebung implicit in the act of translation was something the romantics understood implicitly and romantic irony was a register of their understanding of disjunction between that activity and criticism. But this is where the parallel between the task of the translator and the task of the poet breaks down: the two ‘tasks’ cannot be conflated. The difference between the two can be understood with reference again to the essay ‘Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin’. Here Benjamin introduces three concepts which are crucial to his method of commentary: ‘poetic task’, ‘inner form’ and the concept of the ‘poetised’. The ‘task’ is defined as the a priori of the poem, the underlying conditions of its possibility, or as he puts it, the ‘intellectual-perceptual [geistig-anschaulich] structure of the world to which the poem bears witness’.132 The task is related to what Goethe called ‘inner form’, that is, the dynamic and performative activity of perpetually coming into being. For Goethe, form was not the counterpart to content, but an aspect of a dynamic and everchanging world of forms or ‘morphology’. According to Cassirer, With Goethe’s idea of ‘morphology’, with his conception of the ‘formation and transformation of organic natures,’ a new ideal of knowledge was created … To put it briefly, Goethe completed the transition from the previously generic view to the modern genetic view of organic nature … According to him what we grasp in the [generic view] are only the products, not the process of life. And into this life process he wanted, not only as a poet but also as a scientist, to win an insight … 133

In this move from a generic to a genetic view of nature, which Cassirer sees as characteristically modern, Goethe in effect executes a paradigm shift that fundamentally changes the relations between space and time. Whereas in the generic model of organic nature the world consists of isolated elements with properties which are organised in a spatial relationship at different moments in linear time, in the genetic model, elements are inter-related in a dynamic of continuous activity and change. In the generic model the relationship between the observer and the world is essentially that of a spectator viewing a fixed, unchanging or dead world from afar; in the genetic model the observer is not disconnected from the world but a participant in the living, changing dynamic which folds and unfolds spatially, rather than unfolding consecutively in linear time. Thus in this new context, gaining a sense of nature involves sensing our own inner relations to it and working out inner formative movements that create forms in ourselves and the world: Goethe calls such intimate identification a ‘delicate empiricism’ which ‘becomes actual theory’ insofar as every object that is contemplated well ‘opens up a new organ of perception in us’.134 Thus for Benjamin the poetic task is related to the inner form of the poem in a dynamic and performative manner and he brackets the whole question of lyrical composition and all that that might imply in terms of a ‘can’t-be-mastered’ genius

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and world view on the part of the creator. The task and the poem constitute a unique sphere that Benjamin’s investigation takes as its subject, but which also constitutes the product of that investigation: the investigation itself thus becomes a performative act which creates in the act of analysis. The sphere in which the poetic task and the inner form of the poem are dynamic is called the ‘poetised’ [das Gedichte], which is configured in a special way in every poem. The dynamics in the sphere of the poetised open up the truth of the poem, open up the a priori ideal or ‘necessity’ of the poem, which is the fulfilment of the poetic task. ‘In its general character’, says Benjamin, ‘the poetised is the synthetic unity of the intellectual and perceptual orders. This unity gains its particular configuration as the inner form of the particular creation.’135 For Benjamin, as for Plato, the kind of necessity is nomic and related to the constellations to which naming gives form rather than metaphysical, logical or epistemic necessity. On this model form and content are aesthetically unified and immanent in the poem rather than conceptually distinct, and the poetised preserves this necessity-based fusion. The sphere of the poetised, that is the poetic task and the inner form of the poem which together constitute a unity of form and content, is not derived from a theoretical critique, but is ‘built on the basic law of the artistic organism’.136 In this context the poetised is a limit-concept in relation to the poem, that is, it registers the determinations present in the poem and potentially in other poems, understood individually as well. The poetised is not subjective, nor is it objective: it is immanently linked with the poem itself in that it arises through a loosening of an objectively considered ‘functional coherence’ of the poem and simultaneously makes evident a higher sort of meshing with other sorts of functional unity: ‘[t]hrough this relation to the perceptual and intellectual functional unity of the poem, the poetised emerges as a limit determination with respect to the poem’.137 In this respect the poetised is a limit-concept within the perceptual and intellectual unity of the poem and also the functional unity of the task or solution of the poem which is always for its creator, life. As a limit-concept the poetised facilitates a transition from life to poem: life determines itself through the poem; the task determines itself through the solution. Thus the underlying basis for the poetised is ‘not the individual life-mood of the artist but the life-context determined by art’.138 And it is upon this basis that artistic achievement is to be judged: ‘it is precisely the feeblest artistic achievements that refer to the immediate feeling of life; whereas the strongest, with respect to their truth, refer to a sphere related to the mythic: the poetised’.139 Benjamin calls the mythic ‘the inner greatness and structure of the elements in a poem’ related to ‘the structuration of perception and the construction of an intellectual world.’ However, the analysis of a great work of art does not encounter myth itself, but ‘a unity produced by the force of the mythic elements straining against one another’, that is ‘the intensity of the coherence of the perceptual and intellectual elements’, especially the relations between these elements as they occur in individual poems, because ‘the poetised, itself is, … a sphere of relation between the work of art and life, whose unities themselves are wholly ungraspable.’ Thus it is within the realm of the poetised that the ‘task’ of the poet is to be understood. The poet’s task is not a personalised one: in a sense the poet is the medium



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for the poetic task, which is derived from and stands as the precondition for the poem. Benjamin here depends on what he calls the ‘Law of Identity’ – which is not a substance but a function of law – in which the poet and the life world are suspended in perfect synthesis: This Law of Identity states that all unities in the poem already appear in intensive penetration; that the elements are never purely graspable; that rather, one can grasp only the structure of relations, whereby the identity of each individual being is a function of an infinite chain of series in which the poetised unfolds.140

The relationship between individual beings in this infinite chain is based on the principle of ‘supreme sovereignty’ defined as ‘the innermost identity of the poet with the world, whose emanation is all the identities of the perceptual’. The task of the poet then is to become interpenetrated with the world and safeguard and strengthen the principle of sovereignty. In the analysis of the two poems, Benjamin shows how, in the movement from the first poem to the second, the principle of sovereignty is firmly installed in the second poem: In the ‘Poet’s Courage’, the world of the poem is clearly a mythological and indeterminate one where ‘vision and figure’ are not ‘penetrated’ and are not ‘decisively formed from one intellectual principle’ and where the subject of the poem, its end or purpose, is the death of the poet. ‘Timidity’, on the other hand, is more solidly poetised; the poet is now dead allowing for the emergence of a new cosmos where poet and poem are not merely interpenetrated, but completely merged and the poet’s task has changed from preserving a suspended relationship to becoming a ‘limit with respect to life, the point of indifference, surrounded by the immense sensuous powers and the idea, which preserve the law of the poet in themselves’. Thus on this reading the mythological world is internalised as the poet is merged with the cosmos: death as the final outcome of life becomes death in life, that is, the loss of self in the translucence of the cosmos. As shall be shown, this death in life is the very antithesis of the kind of death in life that Baudelaire comes to represent for Benjamin. Moreover, Benjamin’s reading of Hölderlin will be the German romantic ideal against which he will construct his theory of modernity, based not on symbolic transcendence but on his theory of allegory, which he now fully develops in its first stage and illustrates in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

Benjamin, Klages, Schmitt Before examining the theory of allegory as it gets expressed in the Origin, it is necessary to present two other important influences on Benjamin’s thought: the cosmological vitalist Ludwig Klages and the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt. In his early work Benjamin is committed to the Männerbund culture of Gustav Wyneken, whose philosophical thinking was an eclectic combination of Hegel, Goethe and Nietzsche, but also importantly, Kant. He engages with the thought of all of these philosophers, but conducts a more sustained exchange with the work of Kant in this early period. He does not, however, as indicated above, ever find a way of reconciling

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Kant to a new understanding of experience, though he adapts Kant’s dialectical method for his own purposes. In his search for a total critique, which in his mind was not available in Kant’s transcendentalism, he turns to language, to mythology and also to Lebensphilosophie, specifically that of the graphologist and characterologist Ludwig Klages and his revival of the philosophy of Bachofen.141 Klages, an anti-Semitic ‘popular’ philosopher, whom Georg Lukács considered a ‘pre-Fascist irrationalist’,142 is credited with giving Lebensphilosophie a reactionary twist.143 His philosophy advocated, against ‘mechanistic’ philosophy and particularly against Freud, a notion of reality on the threshold of life and death, existence and nothingness, the individual and the collective. Life’s originary principle is division, the division of body and soul and loss of the sphere of the cosmological. His philosophy appealed to the Nazi psychologists and his Lebensphilosophie – graphology and characterology – were at one time considered for inclusion in the curriculum for a Nazi leadership school.144 Benjamin’s fascination begins as early as 1913 in Hohe Meissner on the occasion of Klages’s address to the German Youth Movement with a speech called Mench und Erde.145 The address castigates jargon terminology such as ‘progress’, ‘culture’ and ‘personality’, which act discursively to legitimate the ascendancy and murderous onslaught of science and technology, the consequences of which have placed human cultures in a hierarchy of development, and the man of science over nature, thus casting a veil over the true character of the discourse of ‘progress’. His purpose is to ‘lift the veil’ and to reveal the perilous state of the world to a younger generation still capable of asking questions. The affect of the speech on Benjamin can be measured by the fact that in the following year he travelled to Munich, as the president of the Freideutsche Jugend, to invite Klages to speak to his group. More importantly, however, the contents of the address furnished him with ideas and a vocabulary that would become integrated into his early essays. The speech lamented the loss of soul146 in the mindless pursuit of power, the consequences of which are ecological destruction in the form of the reduction and extinction of animal species, the extermination of indigenous people through colonialisation, the importation of disease and starvation at the hands of a machine-driven Zivilisation and the ideology of progress which have driven out the old chthonic gods. In short, the symbiosis which held the natural world together, he argued, had been dissolved through industrialisation. Equally, Klages laments the loss of the variety of folk cultures, their songs and music, poetry, dances, colourful apparel, mythologies and festivals, their replacement by soulless forms of ‘entertainment’. The key enemies of the earth are capitalism, legitimised through philosophy, Christianity, which demands the love of mankind at the expense of all other creaturely forms, and utilitarianism. He also introduces a central concept that will be developed in stages throughout his career and be finally published as Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, that is that the spirit and the soul are different, adversaries in bitter conflict to the death and that the daemon spirit is winning the contest, reducing the earth and soul to barren wastelands. The Spirit, and its agent the Will, have gained in strength since the ‘professional loafer’ Socrates sophistically changed the course of philosophy through eroticized conversations which pretended to be rational, but which actually laid the grounds for the ultimate destruction of the intimate



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connection between the body and soul, a division which was later systematised in Kant’s absolute separation of the pneumonal and phenomenal in his three Critiques. What was lost in this democratic turn was the unifying, world-creative power of Eros: progress turns Eros, through the force of will, into the lust for the murder of all nature, including the soul of man. Klages inveighs against moralistic preachers who seek to install ethical programmes directed toward controlling or exterminating feelings. They preach conscience, and in doing so reduce the infinite ‘becoming’ of the natural world and the soul to a finite rational ‘being’. That above-mentioned reorganization, with which history begins, is always and everywhere the same: over the soul rises the spirit, over the dream reigns a wideawake rationality, over life, which becomes and passes, there stands purposeful activity. During the millennial development of spirit, Christianity was only the final, crucial thrust. Therefore spirit, which emerged from a condition of powerless knowledge – Prometheus is in chains, while Herakles is free! – now penetrates the will, and in murderous deeds, which have constituted, without interruption, the history of nations ever since, has revealed a truth that had heretofore seemed to be merely a notion: that a power from outside our cosmos had broken into the sphere of life.147

Some of this vocabulary gets incorporated into a number of Benjamin’s early essays such as ‘Gedanken Űber Gerhart Hauptmanns Festspiel’ (1913) and the abovementioned ‘The Life of Students’ (1915): he criticises the view of historical progress which adheres to a kind of ‘faith’ in the ‘infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress’.148 This view of historical progress merely measures motion, that is, the advancement along a continuum of temporality coupled with the ‘pragmatic description of details’, a methodology that fails to attend to the idiosyncratic, the creative, ‘the most endangered, excoriated and ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind’. Benjamin’s interest in Klages was initially enthusiastic, then critical, but it was never naive. In his ‘Review of Bernoulli’s Bachofen’ (1926), Klages is lauded as a ‘great philosopher’ and Bernoulli applauded for his application of Bachofen’s thought to the ‘grid’ of Klages’s system as represented in Kosmogonis und Eros.149 The extent of Benjamin’s engagement with these ideas can be measured in his review article called ‘The Mendelssohn’s Der Mensch in der Handscrift (1928)’ where he critiques Klages’s view of handwriting by extending the definition from ‘fixed expressive movement’ determined by gesture to say that ‘gesture in its turn is determined by the inner image’.150 In fact, he goes on to criticise the ‘abstruse’ arguments that the Klages vitalism ‘imposes on his graphology’.151 By 1930, his critique of vitalism demonstrates an awareness that Klages’s philosophy is perniciously conducive to fascist ideology, while at the same time continuing to value it. In describing the first volume of Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele to Scholem, he says ‘[i]t is without doubt a great philosophical work, regardless of the context in which the author may be and remain suspect’.152 In ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (1930), a review of a collection of essays

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called War and Warriors edited by Ernst Jünger, he juxtaposes rational thinkers who see possibilities for happiness in technology with the ‘chthonic forces of terror, who carry their volumes of Klages in their packs’ and then decries the crawling forth of ‘barren gloom’ encoded in ‘the mysticism of the death of the world’ in these essays. With shocking prescience he cautions that if war doesn’t correct the relationship between human beings in accordance with ‘the relationship they possess to nature through their technology’ then ‘millions of human bodies will indeed inevitably be chopped to pieces and chewed up by iron and gas’.153 However, Benjamin did not object to Bachofen as such: from the point of view of a ‘destructive character’ it was possible to utilise his concept of myth in a theory of history, language and time. He was concerned, however, that the Klages-Bachofen connection would lead to disastrous political events. In ‘Johann Jacob Bachofen’, written for Nouvelle revue française, he says that ‘the foregrounding of irrational forces in terms of their metaphysical and civic signification, would one day pique the interests of fascist theorists – though it would interest Marxist theorists nearly as much thanks to its evocation of a communist society at the dawn of history’.154 But if the links between his thought and that of Klages are never precisely articulated, Benjamin confirms the direct influence of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s thinking, especially his theory of the ‘state of exception’, seems to be perpetually associated with ‘illegal’ politics, such as that of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and more recently in Anglo-American foreign policies where ‘the state of exception’ theorised by Schmitt had ‘become the rule’ as it had in Germany. The current of this thought has been described as ‘counter-revolutionary’, though, as in most cases, this umbrella term is reductive as the measure of his thought. Derrida describes his works as ‘as ragingly conservative in their political content as they are reactive and traditionalist in their philosophical logic’,155 but then goes on to partly exonerate his theory by showing that what starts out as a ‘pure and rigorous conceptual theory of the political’ having at its core ‘a principle of ruin or spectrality’, when combined with his decisionism leads to an altogether new, essentially corruptible, conception of the political. Benjamin’s own interest in Schmitt predates his conversion to Nazism and it would not be inappropriate to surmise that Benjamin kept stride with most of Schmitt’s publications. In his Curriculum Vitae (III), written in 1928, the year that Schmitt published his Verfassungslehre, which developed the notion of sovereignty in its analysis of the Weimar constitution, Benjamin linked his own ‘eidetic’ and ‘physiognomic’ method of observation and definition in works of art – which regard ‘the work of art as an integral expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of its age, unconstrained in any way by territorial concepts’, a task he undertook in The Origin of German Tragic Drama – with that used by Schmitt in analysing political phenomena: that is, his ‘attempt to integrate phenomena whose apparent territorial distinction is an illusion’.156 In Origin157 he purposefully links his efforts with those of Schmitt who, as he says, in his analysis of political structure makes an analogous attempt to integrate phenomena that can only seemingly be isolated in different areas. Above all,



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however, it seems to me that such observation is the prerequisite for any penetrating physiognomic interpretation of works of art, to the extent that they are unique and inimitable.158

Later that year he wrote to Schmitt informing him that he had sent him a copy of his Origin book and indicating his indebtedness to his ‘presentation of the doctrine of sovereignty in the seventeenth century’. In another letter to Schmitt written in December of 1930, Benjamin ratifies the extent to which both the concept and the method of procedure for Origin were derived from Schmitt’s Political Theology.159 Georgio Agamben has argued that there was indeed an active dialectical exchange between Schmitt and Benjamin; however, on merely a thematic level, certain alliances are clear: for example, in his Habilitationschrift called Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen [The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual] (1914), Schmitt argues that from the perspective of the law and the role of the state to realise the law, the individual ceases to exist: the fundamental antithesis is not between the individual and the state, but between the law and the state because positive law involves the ‘unity of impersonal, supra-empirical rule and the state which is also not an inter-individual instance but a supra-individual idea’.160 The elimination of the individual, that is, its replacement by the law in relation to the state finds a parallel in Benjamin’s extolling of the pre-eminence of language over a fully formulated ‘self ’. As Adorno has pointed out, the salvation of humanity, for Benjamin, was coextensive with the ‘demise of the subject’.161 But whereas Schmitt’s elimination of the individual is in the interest of a clear articulation between law and the practice of law, for Benjamin the ‘truth’ of the demise of the self leads to a new imperative to ‘dig’ through and ‘churn’ the material of language and memory, to discover the buried ‘site of experience’, something Richter describes as his ‘autobiographical poetics’.162 In Political Romanticism (1919), Schmitt disparaged what he called ‘political romanticism’ by which he meant the doctrine of the rational autonomous individual whose strict relationship towards himself leaves the world in an entirely disconnected state. The tendency towards universalism leads only to ‘occasionalist ironism’ or perpetual discussion rather than to the ‘political’. In modern politics which centres on the rights of the individual, general law is not the political because the political is the realm of authority where absolute and final decisions are made. In Political Theology (1922), Schmitt argued for the importance of sovereignty and the role of the sovereign in making absolute decisions. The miraculous power of the sovereign is in its very existence, its ability to act by virtue of the fact of its own existence. ‘Sovereign is he’, he says, ‘who decides what is a state of exception.’163 As we shall see, Benjamin takes the loss of sovereignty in metaphysics as the basis of his understanding of Trauerspiel. In The Concept of the Political (1927) Schmitt laments the loss of the political, that is, the loss of sovereign political decisionism, which for him occurred with the linking of liberalism and democracy, something he traces back to the French Revolution. His argument is as follows: the political is based on the existence of two camps, friends (those who are with us) and enemies (those who are against us). They are engaged in battle and constantly confronted with the possibility

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of death, a confrontation that not only gives recognisable shape to a form of life, but makes life meaningful. The role of the sovereign is in its very existence as sovereign law, deciding on what constitutes a state of exception and then acting. Bourgeois politics eschews the clarity of this order through its insistence on compromise and provisionality, its avoidance of struggle through compromise, the questioning of the legitimacy of a system which rests on the shifting interests of a majority. Schmitt concludes that this kind of safe politics abandons the state to society and private interests. But what is at stake here is more than the preference of dictatorship over liberalism: underpinning this view of the political is an understanding of what it means to be human. Forms of life must be fought for; enemies function to define who we are and hence reinvest meaning in our lives which modernity threatens to destroy. The truth of who we are is bound up with the negation of the enemy. The truly political manifests itself in the ‘state of exception’ because it unleashes antagonisms that must be brought to an abrupt halt with the decision of the sovereign. In the 1928 Verfassungslehre, his interpretation of the Weimar constitution, he gave the onus of power to the Reichspräsident over parliament, a power which included the exercise of the state of exception. Samuel Weber points out that Schmitt’s importance for The Origin of German Tragic Drama is twofold: first, in relation to the history and politics of the origin of the play of mourning in Trauerspiel; and second, he provides insight into the question of sovereignty as a thematic concern and as a methodological and theoretical problem. Giorgio Agamben extends this by linking the Origin directly with two of Schmitt’s works, that is, Political Theology and Dictatorship from which he is also able to devise in the Trauerspiel a political argument. He argues that Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty in Political Theology is inextricably bound to his articulation of the state of exception contained in the earlier Dictatorship (1921), the main thrust of which is to manage a paradoxical articulation, or ‘inscription’ between the suspension of law and the legal order. This articulation operates slightly differently in two forms of dictatorship, namely commissarial and sovereign dictatorships. In a commissarial dictatorship, a distinction is made between ‘norms of law and the norms of the realisation of the law’ where a constitution remains in force in a ‘concrete’ suspension; in a sovereign dictatorship the state of exception allows for the imposition of a new constitution through a distinction between constituent power – which is connected to but not constituted by the constitution. Thus in Political Theology the theory of the state of exception is re-presented as a theory of sovereignty through a distinction between norm and decision whereby the suspension of the constitution actually reveals the autonomy of the norm and the autonomous ‘purity’ of the decision. In her ‘Forward’ to the George Schwab translation, Tracey Strong makes the point that the German version of the first sentence is deliberately ambiguous: Soverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entschiedet, in fact means both he who decides what the state of exception actually is (settles on it) and he who decides what to do about the state of exception.164 The seriousness of the connection between Schmitt and Benjamin can be surmised in the extent of the interaction that took place between the two: Agamben argues that the connection was not merely a recuperation of Schmitt on the part of Benjamin, but a dialogue, in which Schmitt was an active participant and one who continued



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the engagement long after Benjamin had died. Not only did Schmitt make reference to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), but in 1973 he wrote to Hansjörg Viesel stating that his The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbs (1938)165 had been a hitherto unnoticed response to Benjamin.166 Schmitt also claimed that it was an anti-Nazi book, in that it argued that total power should be accorded to the state not a movement and its Fuhrer. Agamben’s argument, however, is that there was an even tighter weaving together of these two thinkers which was in fact initiated by Schmitt, not Benjamin in the Origin book. He argues that Schmitt, an avid reader of Arciv für Sozialwissenschaften und Socialpolitik, a journal that he had himself published in, must have read Benjamin’s dense article called ‘Critique of Violence’ when it was published in issue 47 in 1921. The shift in his argument between Dictatorship, which developed a theory of dictatorship based on the differentiation between two kinds of dictatorship: commissarial (or vindicating the existing constitution) and sovereign (or producing grounds for the creation of a new constitution) and Political Theology, which embedded the notion of the state of exception into the theory of sovereignty, was in fact inspired by that essay. In other words the turn to a discourse on sovereignty was initiated by Benjamin, not Schmitt.167 ‘Critique of Violence’ is a dense and difficult essay, written at a time when the Weimar Republic was particularly chaotic, unable to establish a majority in the Reichstag because of the system of proportional voting and the strength of the individual German states, unable to control the army, subject to regular rebellions and street fighting, and unsupported in the right-wing courts. So it is an essay that is very much responding to a time. It seeks to delineate the different spheres of violence in relation to the law, and to theorise a sphere of violence outside of the law. Recognisably an important essay, in particular as it is the linchpin in determining whether or not Benjamin’s thinking was irrationalist and proto-Nazi, it has been given a strong derogatory reading by Derrida and a strong justificatory reading by Agamben. Parts of the essay are influenced by George Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism, as Derrida points out. The argument itself is quite Kantian in the way it moves dialectically; however, it is anti-Kantian in that it replaces the realm of freedom (reason, God, the Word) with that of pure or divine violence, which has its counterpart in revolutionary violence. The essay begins by distinguishing between natural law and positive law where violence is conceived as a product of law and history respectively. The importance of this distinction is in determining whether legal judgement should be directed toward ends or means: natural law judges existing law in criticising ends, positive law judges all evolving law in criticising means. Thus in judging whether or not the declaration of a state of exception by a sovereign is justified, for example, natural law would judge the success of the measure in overcoming a stated social threat, while positive law would judge whether the law itself was a justified means of overcoming the perceived threat. Having distinguished between these two kinds of law and the foci, Benjamin chooses to look at positive law in an analysis of violence because it makes a distinction between two kinds of violence: sanctioned and unsanctioned. Also in positive law, the sphere of judgement, because it makes a distinction between two kinds of violence, is confronted with having to determine the meaning of violence and then its value. This

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double problematic leads Benjamin to look outside of positive legal philosophy and outside natural law in order to present a third type of philosophic-historical law. He starts with what he calls a general maxim of European law, which is that the natural ends of the individual, say a teacher disciplining a student, must ‘collide with legal ends if pursued with greater or lesser degree of violence’.168 Violence outside the law threatens not just the ends of law but its very existence, thus there is a determination to eliminate all violence outside the law. Some qualifications to this general disposition prevail, however. In the case of a general strike, the right to strike, which is non-violent but can become violent in cases where it turns into a persistent threat even when conditions have changed, is viewed by the state as an abuse of the right to strike, therefore violent, justifying the resort to violent emergency measures. The objective contradiction in the legal situation is that the definition of the right to strike changes when that right is generalised. What the state fears in the case of the general strike is not so much the violence as such, because the ends of the violence could be achieved with predatory violence, but the ‘function’ of the violence which is to make or modify the law. The importance of the lawmaking function is borne out in an analysis of military violence. Military violence has natural ends, to win the war, and legal ends, conscription and a peace agreement: a lawmaking function, the new state of affairs brought into existence with the peace agreement and a law-preserving function, the subordination of citizens to conscription. Benjamin asserts the crucial importance of performing a critique of the law-preserving function – because it is representative of all legal violence – and dismisses objections that might be put forward in the name of anarchism or Kant’s categorical imperative. The law-preserving function in positive law legitimates means to an end because historically it emerges as the means of preserving a legal order imposed by fate. The origin of law, then, is not the realm of transcendental freedom, but fate which gives birth to the threatening violence of preserving and making functions of law. ‘All violence’ he says, ‘is lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity.’169 The functions must be kept clearly separated, however, because of constitutive restrictions: law-preserving must claim victory over fate; lawmaking must not assign new ends. Police violence is pernicious because it is a ‘spectral mixture’ of these two, in which the constitutive restrictions are suspended: this kind of violence is both an assertion of law (lawmaking) and a defence of law (law preserving), disconnected from the metaphysical category of the ‘decision’ attributed to the law – by which the law can be critiqued – thus always a means to an end. For Benjamin police violence is the ‘ghostly presence’ of the security guard, and here he seems to declare counter-revolutionary affinities: It cannot finally be denied that in absolute monarchy, where they [the police] represent the power of a ruler in which legislative and executive supremacy are united, their spirit is less devastating than in democracies, where their existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence.170

For Benjamin violence is inherently a part of the law, and consciousness of this in a legal institution is important otherwise the institution deteriorates, which is the



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problem with the Weimar Republic: it has lost the sense of its violent revolutionary origins. He does not rule out non-violent resolution of conflict, but keeps this in the realm of private individuals. Benjamin then outlines what approaches something of a ‘public sphere’ as depicted in a nonviolent ‘technique of civil agreement’ called the conference, which engages ‘the proper sphere of “understanding” called language’.171 He cites the proletariat general strike as theorised by George Sorel as another case of ‘non-violence’ through its utter indifference to the state. But it is never reason that reigns in questions of law and justice: ‘it is never reason that decides on the justification of means and the justness of ends’, he says, ‘fate-imposed violence decides on the former, and God on the latter’.172 Benjamin then sets about articulating a domain in which violence would be entirely unmediated: it can be found in the outburst of anger in everyday experience, but it also exists in myth where violence is the expression of the very existence of the gods. Benjamin’s interpretation of mythic violence is that it is a pure form of lawmaking violence. The violence imposed by the gods is never punishment for an offence against an already existing law, but the outcome of any challenge to fate. The gods Apollo and Artemis kill Niobe’s 14 children because she presumes to challenge fate: the spontaneous and triumphant violence of the gods brings into being a law by its very exertion. Lawmaking violence is also power-making: the triumph of the gods does not eliminate violence but establishes it in the form of reigning power. ‘Justice’ he says, ‘is the principle of all divine endmaking, power the principle of all mythic lawmaking.’173 In the case of the myth of Niobe, she is first condemned with divine endmaking, and then made guilty with mythic lawmaking. ‘Fate shows itself ’, says Benjamin, ‘in the view of life as having essentially first been condemned and then become guilty.’174 He then applies this to constitutional law, the prerogative of which is to establish frontiers: lawmaking violence does not annihilate opponents, but through its power establishes boundaries between ‘equally great violence’. Here Benjamin returns to the question of fate and its deliberate ambiguity: in primeval times laws established were unwritten, so one could become a victim to one without knowing. Benjamin asserts an analogy between this kind of mythic violence and the lawmaking violence of positive law and calls for the need to destroy this pernicious power-preserving, deliberately ambiguous institution through ‘divine’ violence: If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood … Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it.175

The argument concludes with a discussion justifying annihilating violence, both revolutionary and divine, which can break through the interminable cycle of mythical lawmaking and law preserving and actually suspend the law ‘with all the

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forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded’.176 ‘The Critique of Violence’, then, in the end, makes an analogy between divine violence and revolutionary violence and embraces them both precisely because they can annihilate the state. The essay ends with a definition of divine violence: ‘Divine violence … may be called “sovereign violence”.’ As Derrida points out, however, this divine violence is also a ‘bloodless violence’ which leaves open the terrifying possibility that the holocaust would be thought of as ‘an uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence insofar as this divine violence would be at the same time nihilating, expiatory and bloodless … a divine violence that would destroy current law through a bloodless process that strikes and causes to expiate … an indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God’.177 Schmitt’s response to Benjamin, developed in Political Theology, is to link the question of the authority of the sovereign to decisionism, or the power to define and bring into being a state of exception, a suspension of the constitution in the context of crises or states of emergency, to decide, in the interest of the state’s continued integrity. He argues that it is the exception that makes the ‘subject of sovereignty relevant’ for it is ‘[t]he sovereign who decides on the exception’ and who necessarily stands both outside and inside the ‘normally valid legal system’ because it is he who must assess and decide to suspend the constitution.178 Here we can see that Schmitt turns Benjamin’s argument on its head with the concept of the ‘state of exception’ which effectively brings the suspension of law directly into the remit of law: the state of exception is the law. The Origin of German Tragic Drama should therefore be read as a response to Schmitt, rather than a book that just takes over the terms of his discourse. And later, in 1938, Schmitt, in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, a text written ten years after the publication of Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), and two years after his own removal from the mainstream of influence in the Nazi party, will produce a treatise ostensibly resolving the problem of allegory that is central to Benjamin’s thesis by revising Hobbes’ Leviathan with a theory of sovereignty that entails deciding the state of exception and democracy without individualism. By the time Benjamin writes his Curriculum Vitae VI of 1940, however, Schmitt has been written out of the list of important influences. The final retort is in Thesis VIII of ‘On the Concept of History’: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. 179



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Actualising the Allegorical: The Origin of German Tragic Drama ‘The object of philosophical criticism’, says Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, ‘is to show that the function of artistic form is … to make historical content … into a philosophical truth.’180 Thus in his essay called ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ he poses the question ‘[h]ow can language as such fulfil itself in mourning and how can it be the expression of mourning?’ This question leads him to two insights: first, that Trauerspiel embodies the ‘linguistic glory’ of the lament; second, that there is a relationship between aesthetic form and language: in the German language Trauerspiel is inferior to tragedy but in Hebrew, he speculates, tragedy is inferior to Trauerspiel. This difference in valuation leads him to the conclusion that there is an absolute difference between the two: the task of determining this difference is one of the organising principles behind The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the complexity of which perhaps legitimates its excessively difficult diction which Hans Cornelius denounced in his 1925 review.181 Dominik Finkelde suggests that, because Benjamin’s text is situated at the crossroads of such incommensurable theories such as Nietzsche’s theory of Greek tragedy, Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereign decisionism, the interdisciplinary approach to cultural history characteristic of the Warburg Institute, and the dialogue with Florens Rang with regard to tragedy and the mourning play,182 the obscurantism was a natural consequence. This list of incompatible contributors could be broadened to at least include the work of Franz Rosenszweig and Alois Riegl. In fact, of all of these influences the one particularly important influence on the development of his theory of allegory, one that has been noticeably neglected, is Alois Riegl: in his Curriculum Vitae III from 1928 Benjamin describes his way of observing phenomena in the Origin as ‘eidetic’ as opposed to strictly historical and names two of the contributors to his theory and method, that is the previously mentioned constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, who in his political analyses ‘made a similar attempt to integrate phenomena whose apparent territorial distinctness is an illusion’ and the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, ‘especially his doctrine of Kunstwollen’.183 Little has been written on Riegl’s influence, perhaps because Aby Warburg has been considered more important, especially by George Steiner who thought that Benjamin’s true home was with the Warburg Institute rather than the Frankfurt School. Alois Reigl, along with art historians Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin, participated in the ground-breaking developments of the late nineteenth century history in the works of such thinkers as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke and Johann Droysen, establishing the historical models which are still used as theoretical beginning points for modern historiography. Reigl viewed art history as an autonomous discipline – in terms of its subject matter, thematic goals and visual methods – which exceeded aesthetics and historiography. As Mike Gubser notes, Reigl’s work drew on the developments in history, philosophy, archaeology, aesthetics and anthropology and like Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl,

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he wanted to rethink time and history. His main theoretical construct is that of the Kunstwollen, by which he means the will to art. Like all human will, Kunstwollen is motivated by a desire to ‘give shape’ to man’s relationship to the world: the will to art involves form-giving aesthetic practices which interpret the world, for the individual and for the larger society, such that it will bend to the satisfaction of human desires. He says that all human Wollen is directed towards self satisfaction in relation to the surrounding environment (in the widest sense of the word, as it relates to the human being externally and internally). Creative Kunstwollen regulates the relation between man and objects as we perceive them with our sense; this is how we always give shape and colour to things (just as we visualise things with the Kunstwollen in poetry). Yet man is not just a being perceiving exclusively with his sense (passive), but also a longing (active) being. Consequently, man wants to interpret the world as it can most easily be done in accordance with his inner drive (which may change with nation, location and time). The character of this Wollen is always determined by what may be termed the conception of the world at a given time [Weltanschauung] … not only in religion, philosophy, science, but also in government and law.184

Lukács approvingly grouped him with those important nineteenth-century historians who recognised that changes in structural forms focus ‘man’s interaction with environment at any given moment and which determine the objective nature of both his inner and outer life’ and that these changes were the ‘essence of history’.185 Although Adorno thought that Riegl’s understanding of Kunstwollen put too much emphasis on subjectivity and intentionality and was vulnerable to relativism, he granted that ‘it helped to free aesthetic experience from timeless norms’ and that ‘[n] o artwork is what it aspires to be, but there is none that is more than this without aspiring to be something’.186 Benjamin incorporated Riegl into his thinking as part of a plan to become interdisciplinary in his approach, and to ‘dismantle the rigid partitions between the disciplines that typified the concepts of the sciences in the nineteenth century – and to promote this through an analysis of the work of art’.187 But aside from the desire to methodologically deconstruct institutional territorialism, he also found in Riegl a concept that would allow him to regard the work of art as ‘an integral expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of its age’.188 He strongly admired Riegl’s The Late Roman Art Industry whose approach he incorporated into his methodology for The Origin of German Tragic Drama because it demonstrated the way in which an intrepid research methodology will reveal an era’s most crucial issues. But he also valued it for the way that it described underground forces at work impinging on the Roman art world which he viewed as surfacing again in German Expressionism.189 For Benjamin, the crucial issues of an era are discernible only in the analysis of a dynamic in play, a tension, in which old mediums are forced to contend with new mediums that are different in kind. Riegl believed that the vital concerns of an age were to be found in those works that were marginalised or considered unexceptional because it was possible in these



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works to discern the stirrings of perceptual change. In other words, in marginalised work it was possible to perceive an allegorical graphing process in conflict with an established symbolic order. ‘[T]he production of lesser writers’, says Benjamin echoing Riegl, ‘whose works frequently contain the most eccentric features, will be valued no less than those of the great writer.’190 In his Curriculum Vitae VI, Benjamin outlines the project of the Origin as one of presenting a new view of seventeenth century German drama, whose aim it was to ‘distinguish Trauerspiel [mourning play] from Tragödie [tragedy]’ and to attempt to ‘demonstrate the affinity between Trauerspiel as a literary form and allegory as a graphic art’.191 The basis of the distinction Benjamin makes between tragedy and Trauerspiel is the latter’s marginalisation as an imperfect form. What he reads in it, however, is an entirely different allegorical, graphic formtransforming medium registering a different shape of temporality. Thus it is a perfect source for understanding the allegorical as the bases upon which an age’s inner drive to interpret gathers together in symbolic form. Allegory is the ‘graphic art’, the underpinning transferring performance of the design of the forms of a particular temporality onto a new historical medium. The Origin is an illustration of one such instance of a perpetual process of graphic transference. This graphic transference also has an unbroken evolution for Riegl: In Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament (1893),192 he traces the history of vegetal ornament as a continuous development from Egypt to Ottoman Turkey and argues that style has an autonomy that compels it to evolve and raise new questions in each of its incarnations which are entirely unrelated to technical procedures or mimetic considerations.193 This is because each incarnation produces its own conflicts that are realised in the next stage. Benjamin expresses his understanding of Riegl’s principle of continuity in a review of Karl Blossfeldt’s Originary Forms of Art: Photographic Images of Plants (1928), called ‘News about Flowers’: One senses a gothic parti pris in the bishop’s staff which an ostrich fern represents, in the larkspur, and in the blossom of the saxifrage, which also does honor to its name in a cathedral as a rose window which breaks through the wall. The oldest forms of columns pop up in horsetails; totem poles appear in chestnut and maple shoots enlarged ten times; and the shoots of a monk’s-hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer. Leaping toward us from every calyx and every leaf are inner image imperatives [Bildnotwendigkeiten], which have the last word in all phases and stages of things conceived as metamorphosis.194

Thus, what photographic techniques makes sharply visible is another aspect of the ‘allegorical way of seeing’, that is, the way in which images which are utterly different in kind are made to assume a quality of almost organic unity. Photography and cinematography are tools of allegorical reproduction par excellence in that they can not only plumb hidden depths to make visible what is not noticeably visible, but they also instrument the graphing together of differences in kind to produce the illusion of coherence. It is precisely this illusion that Benjamin addresses in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

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Epistemo-Critical Prologue Benjamin once called the Epistemo-Critical Prologue to the Origin ‘pure chutzpah’, and many critics have used this as a reason for dismissing it. In a letter to Scholem, however, he states that the Prologue is a better representation of the ideas expressed in ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’.195 Close analysis of the Prologue reveals that Benjamin is grappling with some very modern philosophical problems, albeit always on the threshold of what might be called proper philosophical discourse. As the title suggests, this Prologue is there to address epistemological and critical questions ahead of the study proper; but it is also there to justify his ambulatory style. Here Benjamin advances a more comprehensive version of his theory of language, applying it to the critical discourse on the literary history of the baroque. His aim is to establish the methodology for the research which will be partly based on the metaphysics of the monad but which will also ‘account for the organisation of perception at the time the art was produced’.196 In this, language as mental expression in the name and language as concept (or sign) play equally important roles. It begins by flagging up the problem of representation for a philosophy that seeks to distinguish between good and ill-founded judgements and goes on to distinguish between methods used for the acquisition of knowledge and the form of truth itself. The problem with knowledge, as Goethe intimates in the epigraph to the Prologue, is that it is something that is acquired through a method and does not have an essence of its own, and the system of rules and regulations developed to assist in the acquisition of knowledge, that is its codification, is itself historical. Different ways of addressing the problem of truth have particular limitations: the problem with rationalist methods, Cartesian and Spinozistic, efforts that attempt to give shape to genuine knowledge more geometrico, is that the strategies used to eliminate the problem of representation ignore or bypass ‘that area of truth towards which language is directed’. So the Prologue begins by including representation as an important component in the conceptualisation of the form of truth. The point Benjamin makes in this regard is that in any form of codification, and in this rationalism is not excluded, method is not merely a vehicle for instruction but is intimately enmeshed in the inner, secret or esoteric aspects of doctrine itself. Whatever insights such rationalism produces, the belief that genuine knowledge is to be acquired in the complete elimination of the problem of representation is one that can only sustain itself through blindness to the truth in the question of representation, that is, language. Equally, in the nineteenth century, the belief that some external truth can be trapped through system-building and the syncretic weaving of ‘a spider’s web between separate kinds of knowledge’ acquires its universalism at the expense of doctrinal teaching. Benjamin makes the point that reverting to systematisation provides a mechanism for acquiring knowledge; however, in doing so it forfeits the law and exercise of philosophical form, which is to represent truth. Benjamin chooses the treatise as the form of representation most conducive to his study because, as he says, in epochs where it is recognised that it is impossible to capture the essence of truth, the philosophical form of choice is a preliminary study



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called a treatise, which is non-mathematical and non-doctrinal and whose method is representation, that is representation which involves digression. The treatise invites contemplation, hence it is interruptive and digressive in character, tirelessly thinking from new beginnings in order to pursue new levels of meaning of a single object. Derived from the Middle Ages, the treatise develops as fragments of thought, which are highly valuable in the representation of truth, especially when they bear an indirect relation to some underpinning idea; just as the ‘brilliance of the mosaic’ depends on the ‘quality of the glass paste’, so the brilliance of a representation depends on its indirect relation to the idea: The relationship between the minute precision of the work and the proportions of the sculptural or intellectual whole demonstrates that truth content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject matter.197

Fragmentary and digressive, the treatise prohibits the reader from becoming enthusiastically transported, forcing an arrest of the reading activity and reflection in proportion to the significance of the ideas represented for contemplation. The treatise thus becomes the model form for the kind of materialist historiography that he will elaborate later in ‘On the Concept of History’. The truth which is made available through interruption and fragmentation is characteristically written. Speech functions like a veil creating the illusion or semblance of sequential unfolding; whereas, writing’s very modus operandi is that of interruption. In this, Benjamin prefigures Derrida’s insights in Of Grammatology about the western metaphysical bias towards speech, the fact that it ‘always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos: the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been … the debasement of writing, and its repression outside “full” speech’.198 However, the repression of writing is not what concerns Benjamin here: it is the projection of truth through a ‘bodying forth’ of the ‘dance of represented ideas’ into the realm of knowledge. Knowledge is about taking possession of something in consciousness, which is precisely what the dance of ideas (wherein truth is to be found) prohibits. Knowledge requires a method, utilised as an invisible or transparent vehicle for communicating its creation of an object to consciousness; truth, on the other hand is immanent in the form itself. ‘Unlike the methodology of knowledge, this form does not derive from a coherence established in consciousness, but from an essence.’199 The difference between knowledge and truth, then, is that of conceptualisation and interpretation which is open to question (the unity of knowledge could only come about through the coherence of individual insights and their mutual modification), whereas truth has unity as its essence and is therefore not open to question. For if the unity of truth were open to question, the question would have to be ‘how far is the answer to the question already given in any conceivable reply which truth might give to questions?’And the answer to this question would necessarily provoke the same question again, so that the unity of truth would defy all questioning. As a unity of essence rather than a conceptual unity, truth is beyond all question. Whereas the concept is a spontaneous product of the intellect, ideas

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Benjamin goes on to link his careful distinction between truth and knowledge with a theory of truth and beauty that he finds in the Symposium where the connection between the two is conceived in terms of stages of erotic desire. Erotic desire is central as the means by which truth can be revealed in beauty and this he puts in contrast to an understanding of truth as an object of knowledge. Truth is revealed in beauty as an essence which is what links it with the idea. The great philosophies of the world originate in descriptions of an order of ideas; the problem with science is that rather than allowing truth to body forth, it tries to ‘grasp’ it in ‘an encyclopaedic accumulation of items of knowledge’. For Benjamin it is the task of the philosopher to undertake the work of the scientist and that of the artist (thus the epigraph from Goethe’s Materials on the History of the Theory of Colors ‘we must necessarily think of science as art if we are to derive any kind of wholeness from it’.), to perform the work of conceptualisation, which is to redeem phenomena, divide them from the world of appearances, thus enabling them to participate in the ideas, and then to represent those ideas through configuring concrete elements in the concept. No systems, philosophical or scientific have validity ‘except where they are inspired in their basic outline by the constitution of the world of ideas’. The great categories which determine not only the shape of the systems, but also philosophical terminology – logic, ethics, and aesthetics, to mention the most general – do not acquire their significance as the names of special disciplines, but as monuments in the discontinuous structure of the world of ideas.201

So Benjamin’s understanding of the messianic begins at the level of phenomena which have been distorted, given the false unity of appearances, but which can be divided in the halting, interruptive activity of the concepts, which ‘effect the resolution of objects into their constituent elements’, are presented in their basic elements and hence become available for, or redeemed in, the genuine unity of truth. In Benjamin’s scheme, concepts mediate, that is they perform two tasks: first they redeem phenomena, that is reconcile phenomena with the unity of truth in the idea, a critical task; secondly, they render actual the configuration of renewed ideas in empirical representation, a formal task. In this, phenomena are not contained in ideas; ideas are the ‘virtual arrangement’ or the ‘objective interpretation’ of phenomena: Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed; so that those elements which it is the function of the concept to elicit from phenomena, are most clearly evident at the extremes … Ideas … remain obscure so long as phenomena do not declare their faith to them and gather round them. It



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is the function of concepts to group phenomena together, and the division which is brought about within them thanks to the distinguishing power of the intellect is all the more significant in that it brings about two things at a single stroke: the salvation of phenomena and the representation of ideas.202

Ideas, therefore, are not a product of intellectual vision, because vision does not ‘enter into the form of existence that is peculiar to truth’ and ‘truth is the death of intention’. Here Benjamin is taking his starting-point from phenomenology’s first precept which makes intentionality – defined as the fact of being, under felicitous conditions, directed towards an object in terms of meaning – the organisational structure of experience. Benjamin’s critique returns to the essence of truth: This, indeed is just what could be meant by the story of the veiled image of Saïs, the unveiling of which was fatal for whomever thought thereby to learn the truth … Truth is not some intent which realises itself in empirical reality; it is the power which determines the essence of this empirical reality.203

What he objects to is the confusion between the ‘mode of being in the world of appearances’ and the ideal realm of truth. The mode of being appropriate to this ideal realm of truth is the name. Hence Benjamin’s critique of phenomenology is given through his own unique theory of language. The power of determining the essence of empirical reality belongs to the name, which ‘determines the manner in which ideas are given’. Ideas are given in a primordial form of perception ‘in which words possess their own nobility as names, unimpaired by cognitive meaning’. Benjamin cites Hermann Güntert, the early twentieth-century linguist and scholar of Religionswissenschaft, particularly Indo-European religion, who in 1921 published a work called Von der Sprache der Götter und Geister in which he identifies a metalinguistic trope through which many Indo-European languages oppose a language of gods to a language of men. While the language of the men is unmarked, the language of gods is a highly marked poetic diction ‘suitable for poetry, and other divinely inspired, quasi-esoteric, and self-consciously elegant acts of discourse’.204 On this basis Güntert argues that Plato’s ideas were linguistic: ‘deified words’: The idea is something linguistic; it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word. In empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess, in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect, an obvious profane meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given selfconsciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly directed communication.205

The role of the philosopher is ‘to recall in memory the primordial form of perception’, not through ‘actualising images’, but through contemplation. What distinguishes this primordial form of perception is that it is without play, words do not need to communicate, they exist without an intentional structure and their significance is in their being. Adam’s work of naming in Genesis verifies the law that ‘all ideas exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from phenomena, but, especially

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from each other’, that is that their essences exist, discontinuously, at unbridgeable distances. The work of philosophy is to renew these essences in contemplation, not invent more terminology intentionally fixed on an object. Thus, ideas do not communicate, but exist, ideally, in a harmonious relationship to each other. This harmony is called truth. Moreover, the multiplicity of truth is finite, not infinitely expansive; it is discontinuous because completely separate from objects and conditions, and utterly unable to be forced into existence dialectically (pace Marx and Hegel). It is on these points that Benjamin distinguishes his perspective from that of the early romantics: [I]ts discontinuous finitude, has not infrequently, frustrated energetic attempts to renew the theory of ideas, most recently those undertaken by the older generation of the romantics. In their speculations truth assumed the character of a reflective consciousness in place of its linguistic character.206

Harmony and discontinuity characterise essences which constitute the law of ideas, which are contained in the name, which exist in constellations, wherein lies truth. This reiteration of Benjamin’s primordial understanding of language and the form of idealism that it represents is itself iterated in the philosophy of art. From the perspective of the philosophy of art Trauerspiel is an idea and as such considered to have unity. But this philosophical perspective is insufficient as an approach to this form – and here he implicitly invokes his view of language as now ‘fallen’ – because analysis must also include the literary, historical, evolutionary aspects of the form, in other words its emergence within the ‘decadent’ temporality of cultural decline, characteristic of the baroque. The critical tendency to hypostatise variety in keeping with requirements of an idea produces not tension but incongruity: for Benjamin it is not possible to communicate the essence of an artistic enterprise. In terms of tragedy, any attempt to create congruity between exclusively situated emergences excludes key questions regarding the necessity of the historical emergence of a form. However, Benjamin’s main concern is not to prioritise the historicising perspective over that of the Platonic theory of science, but to keep a critical understanding of both in play in the analysis of the Trauerspiel. The imperative of formulating ideas is not served through inductive or deductive methodologies – these will only inevitably distort the concept by virtue of the desire to be comprehensive – but by focusing on the exemplary. Martin Jay and Richard Wolin, among others, argue that the theory of language reiterated in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue is derived from Jewish Kabbalistic thought. It is certainly a thoroughly theological, anti-phenomenological treatise, the idealism of which is lost except through critical acrobatics and, of course, translation. But it is not arbitrary or unsystematic as can be seen in the way that he moves from his theory of language into his theory of art. In part this bridge is facilitated by Leibniz’s monad: whereas previously the idea was a ‘discontinuous finitude’, here ‘[t]he idea is a monad. The being that enters into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings – concealed in its own form – an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics



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(1686), every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others … every idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world.207

This bridge is also to a large extent facilitated by Riegl’s Kunstwollen: if Benjamin was disparaging about the false presentation of truth as ‘an intent’ which is realised in the ‘appearance’, he happily engages the notion of an ‘artistic will’, which he views as apparent in epochs of ‘decadence’, or often overlooked periods of ‘decline’. Riegl argues that the temporal coherence of art objects is interrupted or disrupted in epochs of decadence, and that this disruption is a decay that allegorised ‘the transience of all cultural production’.208 This ‘allegory of temporality’ was applied to late Roman art, but Benjamin adapted it to explain the baroque: [T]he baroque is not so much an age of genuine artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will. This is true of all periods of so-called decadence. The supreme reality in art is the isolated, self-contained work. But there are times when the well-wrought work is only within reach of the epigone. These are periods of ‘decadence’ in the arts, the periods of artistic ‘will’. Thus it was that Riegl devised this term with specific reference to the art of the final period of the Roman Empire. The form as such is within reach of this will, a well-made individual work is not.209

As claimed earlier, an important theme in Origin is the problem of the pre-eminence of institutionalised critical and philosophical methods and perspectives which so often flout attempts to ascertain the truth of an aesthetic artefact in terms of its historical emergence. Here Benjamin is writing in the forefront of thinking about time and history in modernity, especially in relation to conventional assumptions behind narrativity, temporality and objectivity. Cutting through entrenched but what he considers flawed versions of truth requires an intuition of the truth from the position of what has been marginalised.

Trauerspiel and Tragedy Benjamin’s theory of allegory finds its justification in what can be perceived as changes in the human sensorium in the baroque era. As an aesthetic form the baroque was sanctioned by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent because its intentional structure was visceral, aimed at the common people and the senses as a means of combating Protestantism. But in the context of Lutheran Germany, the corruption of sovereignty coupled with the Protestant belief that redemption was based on grace rather than good works produced a disjunction between the ‘creative will’ and the technical ability for its achievement. The baroque Trauerspiel, produced at a time of extreme decadence, was a product of this disjunction and the reason for its marginalisation as an imperfect form. It thus became an important resource for Benjamin in actualising the theory of allegory that had been incubating in his early

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works. Articulating the operations of allegory in the German mourning play was, for Benjamin, crucial to his challenge to the presumptions of ontological coherence and spiritual transcendence made on the part of romanticism, and crucial also for a proper orientation towards history. The Origin abounds with references which describe allegory as an important source of historical understanding. [I]n tragedy, says Benjamin, ‘demonic fate is breached.’210 It is the speechless and heroic stand against the gods which breaks the power of fate. The problem of linking the modern with the idealism of antiquity is precisely the problem of Trauerspiel. This section of the Origin begins with Riegl’s habit in Problems of Style of identifying oppositions presented in a work, sometimes as extremes in a spectrum and sometimes as mere juxtapositions.211 Benjamin declares that the study of extremes accomplishes two things: the first is to establish a spectrum which values greater as well as lesser writers, and which distinguishes between the ‘incarnation of the form’ and its ‘characteristic expression’, or the emergence of a form and the characteristic way the form tries to resolve the questions arising from its previous incarnation; the second is, in the context of his study, to examine the extremism inherent in the baroque theory of drama which has been thus far determined by the empirical ‘data’ of historicism’s inclination towards periodisation. Benjamin identifies the Renaissance with two antithetical forces which impinge on the human sensorium: the ‘will to classicism’ combined with a ‘wildness and recklessness’. What he is claiming here is that the will to form, in this case classicism, approached from the temporal perspective of the Renaissance induces a kind of violent overmastering characteristic of the elaborations of the baroque. For him it is vital to understand this dynamic in itself as opposed to dismissing it as merely a failed version of tragedy. Thus he dispenses with Aristotle. Tragedy and Trauerspiel are viewed as emerging from different sources. Whereas tragedy is ‘conflict between God and Fate, the representation of the primordial past which is the key to a living sense of national community’, history is the ‘artistic core’ of Trauerspiel, specifically the historical events, born out of the counter-reformation, which gave absolute sovereign powers to monarchs and held up the princedom as that which could produce stability and ‘guarantee continuity of the community’. The connection with historical events is embedded in the use of the term ‘Trauerspiel’ which in the seventeenth century designated both drama and historical events.212 Here Benjamin returns to the theory of sovereignty which he introduced in ‘Critique of Violence’, and which Schmitt reacted to in Political Theology. It is precisely in the seventeenth century that the sovereign becomes the representative of history rather than a boundary stone between man and God typical of the antique world. With the Gallican articles the theocratic state is made to cede to the absolute right of the monarch. In response to Schmitt, Benjamin here distinguishes between the modern concept of sovereignty and that of the baroque: whereas modern sovereignty includes extreme executive power, baroque sovereignty, by contrast, is defined in relation to its function of forestalling or averting states of exception caused by such things as war, civil insurgence, or economic and political aberrations. It emerges as the product of discussion (Diskussion des Ausnahmezustandes)213 related to the tension between the ideal of restoration and the idea of catastrophe that ‘haunts’ it. Benjamin,



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therefore, recuperates his earlier reading of sovereignty, but carefully distinguishes the seventeenth-century context from its modern incarnation as presented in Schmitt. And whereas, as Agamben points out, in Political Theology the paradigm for the state of exception is the miracle, Benjamin here makes it the catastrophe. Now Agamben claims that the version of the Origin published in the Gesammelte Schriften is fatally flawed in that the sentence ‘Es gibt eine barocke Eschatologie’ has been rendered Es gibt keine barocke Eschatologie; und eben darum einen Mechanismus, der alles Erdgeborne häuft und exaltiert, bevor es sich dem Ende überliefert.214 (The baroque knows no eschatology; and for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to their end.)215

However, the book was published first in 1928, when Benjamin was still alive, so if there was a mistake (the Rowohlt edition is unavailable) the mistake would have had to be deliberately made by Adorno and Scholem. In any case, to claim that the baroque knows an eschatology runs counter to the entire trajectory of the book which is to establish the grounds for a changed orientation of experience in linguistic being, a modification in the European sensorium, in accordance with ‘the futility of world events and the transience of the creature as stations on the road to salvation,’216 indeed, the hopelessness of mere life which registers in the rejection of eschatology in the new dramas throughout Europe of the time. The problematic that they grapple with is the ‘transposition of the originally temporal data into a figurative spatial simultaneity’,217 in other words how to weave temporality, no longer directed towards transcendence, into the experiential co-ordinates of the spatial. In this context, the German Trauerspiel is ‘taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition’.218 The absence of eschatology is a theme carried through this section of the Origin, and is registered with the emergence of melancholy. The new language that arises in the Trauerspiel is premised on an entirely different theological world in which there is no guarantee of grace, and which is utterly bereft of eschatological certainty. The consequences of this absence are overcompensation, or what Benjamin describes in ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ as overnaming: The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.219

Thus the thematic content of drama is linked with the commands and actions of kings – ‘killings, despair, infanticide and patricide, conflagrations, incest, war and commotion, lamentation, weeping, sighing and suchlike’.220 ‘The religious man of the baroque era clings so tightly to the world because of the feeling that he is being driven along to a cataract with it.’221 In this the key figure of the sovereign becomes irrevocably part of the creaturely world, a tyrant and martyr in one, subject to the intrigues of

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no-longer-loyal courtiers and to fate. Whereas for Schmitt the sovereign ‘is identified with God and occupies a position in the state exactly analogous to that attributed in the world to the God of the Cartesian system’,222 the reconceived notion of sovereignty that emerges in the seventeenth century is more complex. The corruption of the prince in the guise of a tyrant, his violence, contrasts sharply with his unlimited hierarchical dignity and any demonstration of extreme violence shows him to be the victim of history and fate: this combined creaturely and divine embodiment make it virtually impossible for the tyrant to make a decision. Stoicism sits alongside constantly shifting emotional states; thoughtful action is replaced by changing physical desires. Thus indecision becomes the ‘complement of bloody terror’.223 Since the role of the prince is revered as integral to the world, his downfall is a judgement on both mankind and history. The prince adopts the guise of martyr, therefore, when, despite the disloyalties of courtiers and the machinations of history, he retains the expected magnanimity and virtuosity of his role. Ultimately, the disjunctive coexistence of the sovereign’s sublime status and his inability to act make impossible firm generic distinctions between dramas of tyranny and dramas of martyrdom. Benjamin teases out the differences between Trauerspiel and tragedy. Tragedy involves an orientation towards death as a limit – the death of the tragic hero is an ultimate limit for both the hero and an epoch – which guarantees immortality in the name of the hero and his time. The odd number of acts indicates a final decisive culmination, a decision or resolution. The Trauerspiel, on the other hand, is more complex: though it too is oriented towards death, the character of death is different in that it is not finally decisive as it is in tragedy. It contains ‘constellations’ of heroes rather than a single hero and there is a mood of spiritual restlessness within a looming and oppressive world. The transcendent realm is absent as the spatial dimension, consisting of the ‘world of things’ struggles to merge with the temporal dimension consisting of transcendental phenomena of ghostly apparitions, dreams, and terrors. These dramas embody the tragedy of demonic fate, where creaturely guilt (original sin) has unleashed fatalities at the same time as it is consigned to the law of the natural world. Typically they have an even number of acts which signals indecisiveness and lack of resolution, something that is thematised in a spirit world with the constant repetition of returning spirits from the grave. In addition there is a pervasive melancholy, linked to the Lutheran imperative towards duty – which carries no hope of redemption in good works but by grace alone – and to human action bereft of value. The laws of Trauerspiel, according to Benjamin, are to be found in a theory of mourning which can be developed from the world described through the eyes of a melancholic man. Mourning, like love, is not a transient passion, but possesses the power of intensification and deepening, an ability to bury itself in the life world. The desire to escape the oppressiveness of pious duty produces contradictions: a propensity towards ostentatiousness, and equally, self-absorption; contemplative paralysis, sloth and dullness combined with a great power of intelligence and contemplation; the bipolar disorder of depression combined with manic ecstasy. Mourning is thematised in the Trauerspiel in several ways: with the sovereign’s inability to be alone because of creaturely and historical guilt and the subsequent use of worldly



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things to escape from himself; and with the depiction of the court as an image of hell, now described as a condition of perpetual and everlasting mourning, where the sovereign lives in constant fear of the ravages of fate and the treacheries of intriguers. The sovereign, as melancholic, is ruled by Saturn and the black bile of the spleen: his complexion is sallow and he exudes envy, greed, avarice, timidity, and faithlessness. He is also characterised by melancholic acedia: apathy, indecisiveness and slowness.224 All of these symptoms are related to the ‘deadening of emotions’ and lead to, over time, a profound alienation from the body. This kind of alienation arises again but more profoundly in another period of European decadence, that is, the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Baudelaire.

Allegory and Trauerspiel In this section Benjamin begins with the famous tirade against the ‘tyrant’ theosophical aesthetics perpetuated by the romantics, and equally classicist interpretations of the baroque (that is, critics who read the baroque as primarily influenced by classicist principles derived from Aristotle in particular) which have elevated a particular notion of the symbol above allegory. At issue is a distortion of the theological symbol in the construction of the romantic symbol such that the characteristically paradoxical character of the theological symbol in its unity of ‘the material and transcendental object’ is made to become a ‘relationship between appearance and essence’, that is a holistic union of the beautiful and the divine, where ‘the immanence of the moral world’ is ‘in the world of beauty’. This transformation is achieved through the apotheosis of a perfect and implicitly ethical individual,225 who is placed within an infinite progression of events which prove sacred and redemptive. What is theoretically problematical for Benjamin in this process of aestheticisation is the uncritical absorption of the ethical subject in the individual. Thus the unity of the divine and the beautiful in the symbolic which is achieved in the actions of the individual and thus ultimately projected into the culture is wholly without immanent critique. So although this version of symbol has been consistently, in Germanistik and British literary history, set up as a model upon which to evaluate and ultimately devalue allegory, the practice has prevented a true understanding of modern baroque allegory. Here, once again, we must invoke Benjamin’s theory of language to understand what is precisely at stake in this charge of flawed understanding. For Benjamin, allegory is not only a trope but a mode of expression whose authentic dialectical counterpart is as much ‘pure language’ as it is symbol. The genuine notion of symbol, which Benjamin does not disclaim, would pertain to the condition of prelapsarian unity, before the Fall into ‘translucence’ of being. In fact the term ‘translucence’ is used by Coleridge in his Biographical Literaria, but as a description of the symbol as trope. The notion of symbol being invoked by the romantics, as Benjamin indicates, transforms the classicist apotheosis of the perfect hero by embodying a mechanics of transcendence by which the hero as individualist achieves redemption. This model of the symbol is theological and functions in the construction of a theosophical aesthetics

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which includes the individual in a series of progressing events which are uncritically deemed ethical, and which draw the romantic hero inwardly to the translucent circle of the beautiful soul. For Benjamin, the temporality of progression in this tropological unfolding and spiritual uplifting of the individual is a cultural construction in keeping with the Christian doctrine of faith in the love of a personal God. And that is perhaps part of the reason why philosophers as different as Goethe and Schopenhauer, not to mention a whole tradition of modernist critics (including Yeats) condemn allegory. In this Schopenhauer anticipates Derrida’s argument in Of Grammatology when he makes allegory a metaphor for writing: ‘This objection’, says Benjamin, ‘is of fundamental importance for our attitude to every major object of baroque allegory.’226 What distinguishes the baroque from this romantic view of redemption in the beautiful is a dialectical movement between extremes which register politico-theological problems affecting the religious ethics of the entire community. Properly understood (and Benjamin implies that it has never been properly understood) allegory dialectically registers the instability characteristic of a postlapsarian world. It is ‘a form of expression’ (like speech and like the system of signs, writing), and as a form of expression, it dominates the baroque. By contrast, in keeping with what classicist entelechy demands, most classicist interpreters, Herbert Cysarz and Friedrich Creuzer are cited specifically, link allegory with the sign. These classicists come closer to the truth of allegory than the romantics in their own way of comparing it to symbol, in that they include the concept of time. Creuzer, therefore, describes the essence of symbol as having a seizing force upon being, which is ‘momentary’ like the ‘inscrutability’ of its origin which flashes forth like lightning illuminating the night or like the ‘sudden appearance of a ghost’.227 Benjamin points out how, just as romantic aesthetic principles contoured their understanding of symbol, so classicist aesthetic principles shape the understanding of classist critics. Thus the symbol is not connected with moral uplifting, as it is with the romantics, but with grace and beauty. This version of symbol is what Benjamin describes as ‘plastic’, in contrast to the religious or mystical symbol of the romantics. He quotes Creuzer’s description of symbol, as influenced by the overarching and infinite power of the inexpressible which in seeking expression, produces clarity, but ultimately destroys the ‘fragile vessel of earthly form’. The plastic symbol therefore capitulates under the power of such infinite destruction and conforms to the natural forms of nature and ‘[o]ut of the purification of the pictorial on the one hand, and the voluntary renunciation of the infinite on the other’, there grows ‘the finest fruit of all that is symbolic’.228 On this model, allegory is linked with myth, ‘the essence of which is most adequately expressed in the epic poem’.229 Summarising Gorres, Benjamin makes symbol the expression of the self-contained mystical instant and allegory the ‘successively progressing, dramatically mobile, dynamic representation of ideas’ which has acquired the very fluidity of time. For Benjamin symbol assumes meaning into a hidden interior, while allegory is immersed into the depths which ‘separate visual being from meaning’ and is caught in the ‘violence’ of a ‘dialectical movement’.230 Differing configurations of time and destruction, then, turn out to be the discriminating factor



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distinguishing allegory from symbol. As described in the epigraph which opens this chapter, both symbol and allegory involve destruction: whereas symbol involves the blasting apart of the earthly form in seeking expression of the inexpressible and manifesting in the redeeming flash of illumination and transcendence, the allegorical way of seeing confronts a landscape of fossils that mark a mournful human history depicting man’s ultimate subjection to nature, and ultimately to death, without the guarantee of apotheosis or even meaningful existence. Death is the profound limit that gives rise to both signification and significance in the world of things deprived of eschatology: it raises the question ‘What is life?’. The ‘birth’ of modern allegory, that is allegory as a mode of expression, Benjamin explains, is as ‘a strange combination of nature and history’.231 It is connected to medieval allegory as a form, but is distinguished from it in ‘historical-philosophical terms’: whereas medieval allegory is ‘didactic and has its source in Christianity’, modern allegory has a different source. Karl Giehlow, in researching the work of the sixteenth-century humanists discovered that they had misunderstood an earlier attempt to interpret the enigmatic hieroglyphs of ancient Egyptian obelisks (that of the hierogrammatist Horapollon in Hieroglyphica). Horapollon had interpreted these pictorial signs in a religious context as the ‘ultimate stage in the mystical philosophy of nature’, so the sixteenth-century humanists adopted this method of allegorical exegesis and replaced historical and cultic data with ‘natural-philosophical, moral, and mystical commonplaces’, thus producing a ‘new form of writing’ based on the rebus rather than letters.232 Baroque allegory has its source in antiquity with its emphasis on the emblematic character of nature and the conviction that ‘the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians contain a hereditary wisdom, which illuminates every obscurity of nature’, that is all things human and divine.233 Besides its source, what distinguishes modern allegory from medieval allegory can be ascertained from the antinomies of allegory generally, where signification is both devalued and elevated: on the one hand, it is entirely relativistic, ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’; on the other hand, the power of signification to point at something else has the effect of elevating signifiers above the profane and thus exalting them.234 A corollary to this contradiction is that allegory is both convention and expression. Modern allegory, on the other hand, is not ‘convention of expression, but expression of convention’ and in its own attempt to preserve its sacred character, as well as in the imperative for profane comprehensibility, ‘the written word tends toward the visual’.235 Baroque allegory shares with romanticism the desire to correct classical art, but it is ‘a more concrete, more authoritative and more permanent version of this correction: Whereas romanticism inspired by its belief in the infinite, intensified the perfected creation of form and idea in critical terms, at one stroke the profound vision of allegory transforms things and works into stirring writing.236

Modern allegory, rather than perpetuating the illusion of unity of form, as does romanticism, makes manifest the fragmentary, the unfree, the transient, the inevitable decay of all of nature and with it history. In this there is a conflict, not a resolution, between

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theological and artistic intentions, between the sacred and the profane. The essence of allegory as fragment is testament to the fact that criticism must be the mortification of the work in order to settle knowledge, rather than, as the romantics would have it, ‘awakening of the consciousness in living works’.237 The idea that consciousness is the triumphal charioteer immersed in but nevertheless exerting authority over nature is, on Benjamin’s reading, a fallacy: ‘[w]here man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention and to triumph over it’.238 The Origin of German Tragic Drama depicts baroque allegory as an integral aspect of the human embodiment in a violent and transformative historiography which begins in the sixteenth century and is manifest in the German Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century. In Richter’s words, the book ‘thematises the baroque allegorisation of the suffering, dismembered body as an emblematic instance of the modern subject in pain’.239 This ‘allegorical attitude’ is a way of seeing, a mode of being and a form of expression, one integral to the baroque understood as the conflict between theological and artistic intentions, and one that unlike the romantic symbol, achieves synthesis not so much as peace, but as a ‘treuga dei between conflicting opinions’.240

The Arcades Project: The Dialectical Image and Baudelaire Benjamin’s thinking takes a turn after the completion of The Origin of German Tragic Drama: this was due in part to his new relationship with the ‘Russian revolutionary from Riga’, Asja Lucis, his reading of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, his changed prospects and consequent material circumstances. Buck-Morss says that his ‘understanding of his trade had changed from esoteric treatise writer to mechanical engineer’.241 Her reading inclines toward a rupture in Benjamin’s thought, one that parallels a shift from the imperatives of academic discourse to ‘the desire to make allegory actual’. Thus, on her reading there is a shift from theory to experience, precisely the visual experience of images which catalogue the changes from a stable and unchanging traditional world to social and cultural fragmentation: ‘[t]he allegorical mode allows Benjamin to make visibly palpable the experience of the world in fragments, in which the passing of time means not progress but disintegration’.242 It is true that before 1924 Benjamin’s interests were partly directed towards an analysis of the affinity and differences between the German baroque as depicted in the Trauerspiel and romanticism, based on his revaluation of allegory, though he was reading and translating Baudelaire as early as 1914. But after the rejection of his Habilitation thesis, he began to develop his approach in line with his new career as journalist and cultural critic of the avant-garde in France and Russia. The move from esoteric to engineer, nevertheless, if this is a useful description of the deepening of his theoretical understanding, is carried forward by his own allegorical frame of mind. What changes is the ‘mode of existence’ and ‘the mode of perception’ of the European collective brought about by the shattering of tradition with modern forms of technology and the loss of what he calls the aura. Whereas in the seventeenth century, allegory is the graphing process that ‘othered’ as it violently inscribed new experiences of temporality onto



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pre-existing historical forms, and the figure of death in this destruction is emblematised as a corpse, in the nineteenth century with mechanical reproducibility, especially film, the process of inscription becomes death itself internalised. ‘In the nineteenth century, allegory withdrew from the world around us to settle in the inner world. The relic comes from the cadaver; the souvenir comes from the defunct experience [Erfahrung] which thinks of itself, euphemistically, as living [Erlebnis]’243 He, like his nineteenth-century flaneur Baudelaire, is ‘nourished on melancholy’ and infected with the gaze of the alienated man. Benjamin describes this way of seeing: Let us compare time to a photographer – earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of that essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are. And there is Baudelaire: he doesn’t possess the vital fluid either – the fluid in which these plates would have to be immersed so as to obtain the true picture. But he, he alone, is able to read the plates, thanks to infinite mental efforts. He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And from this presentiment speaks the negative of essence in all his poems.244

The metaphor of time as a photographer here registers the centrality of technology in the context of commodity capitalism. But equally important, this passage makes evident the relationship between the allegorist, Baudelaire, and the architectural principle hidden in The Arcades Project, that is the dialectical image. Two points should be made: first, the work is unfinished and was not even close to being finished when Benjamin died; secondly, it is made up primarily of quotations which are arranged in many different Convolutes (convolve: to roll together), which suggest themes related to the nineteenth century. In fact, the quotations are the very material of a materialist historiography, that is, the material basis out of which the dialectical image will manifest and be available for reading. Time as photographer here has the power to arrest the flow of temporality, to bring it ‘together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’. This is the production of the dialectical image where the ‘image is dialectics at a standstill’: For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.245

The move from the temporal relation of the present to the past to the dialectical relation of the what-has-been to the now is also the move from the temporal to the figural and this is not only the death of the directedness of acts of consciousness (intention), but the emergence of what is genuinely historical. Although the dialectical image emerges in the medium of language, in this case the linguistic being of the negative, it is not merely textual, but an aspect of reality which becomes available for recognition, or what Benjamin also calls awakening. These dialectical images are not

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phenomenological essences, that is, they do not arrest the meaning of the world as it comes into being in the immediacy of lived experience: they are historical indications of the time that they belong to and they accede to readability only at ‘a specific critical point in the movement of their interior’ where ‘[e]very present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognisability’.246 Thus history can be defined as the dialectical image in which the past and the present are brought together in a constellation, and which transforms the immediacy of temporality into figure, or as Benjamin states in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, into a face, or indeed a death’s head, that is allegory. History, for Benjamin, freezes, congeals or condenses into images: ‘History’ he says, ‘decays into images, not into stories.’247 Historical recovery is therefore never the construction of narratives, but the interpretation of dreams. The Arcades Project was originally conceived as an interpretation of the collective dream of the nineteenth century, a materialist dream, thoroughly corporeal rather than psychological: Benjamin is wary of psychologising impulses, of both the Jungian and Freudian persuasions. In Jung’s work he reads a ‘[f]ascist armature’, that is, as he writes to Scholem, ‘the devil’s work through and through, which should be attacked with white magic’.248 Whereas National Socialism wreaks vengeance on the Western ‘enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame’, Jung wreaks vengeance for the ‘hewing down of Wotan’s oak249, 250 by the Christian missionaries’. The kind of archaic history that is presupposed in Jung’s collective unconscious, whatever he himself may have maintained to the contrary,251 is thoroughly fascist because it ‘makes semblance in history still more delusive by mandating nature as its homeland’.252 Freud’s theories of sexuality and dreams, on the other hand, while not fascist, are essentialist in terms of human nature and interpretatively ahistorical. Neither Jung nor Freud offer helpful insight into the kind of materialist historiography that he seeks to develop with The Arcades Project: ‘just as the baroque book’, he says, ‘dealt with the seventeenth century from the perspective of Germany’, The Arcades Project would ‘unravel the nineteenth century from France’s perspective’.253 In nineteenth-century France, the goals of the bourgeoisie were realised, according to Benjamin, with the reign of Louis Philippe, the ‘citizen king’ who represented the principle of popular sovereignty over hereditary right. His reign was commensurate with the splitting of the private and the public in keeping with the needs of the private individual. The private emerges as the necessary counterpart to the public and the social: it upholds, affirms and establishes the truth of the illusions of the individual. Aesthetically, the universe of the individual is given shape in the interiority of the private apartment. But this is also a ruse and a compensation for the lack of privacy that marks the advance of technology in the city. With the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–79) the interior becomes encased with coverlets and plush fabrics, the marks and traces of the personality of the individual. Then with the development of new materials such as cast iron, engineers and artists battle for design ethos and when in 1805 CharlesFrançois Viel published ‘On the Uselessness of Mathematics for Assuring the Stability of Buildings’ it was barely 100 years before the engineers won out. As Benjamin interprets it, Jugenstil emerges in dialectical opposition as the ‘shattering of the interior’;



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contrary to its own stated ideology, Jugenstil arises around the turn of the century as a contradiction to the insularity of inwardness, ‘the last attempted sortie of an art besieged in its ivory tower by technology’.254 Jugenstil ‘sounds the death knell of the genre’: art stylises techtonics. Iron and concrete become aspects of the ornamentation; ‘the house becomes the plastic expression of the personality’.255 But in this sterile anti-genre is a bourgeois ‘will’ (Kunstwollen would be the term used by Reigl) to set up nature as the antithesis of technology and hence to redeem nature from its destruction by technology. Thus Jugenstil, like allegory itself, carries within itself an apperception of time. But this dichotomous relationship between nature and technology which might ostensibly save nature is a ‘false redemption’256 doomed to failure: the complicity leads to the eradication of the last vestiges of nature with the dialectical and violent emergence of Futurism. Thus it disappears and dwelling is transformed for the living and the dead, in hotels and crematoria respectively.257 Jugenstil ‘radically’ disrupts ‘the world of the shell’ and though it is condemned to failure, it liberates advertising: ‘[i]n Jugenstil we see, for the first time, the integration of the human body into advertising’. This transformation of the body happens through allegory, ‘the personification of commodities rather than of concepts’: ‘Jugenstil introduces the allegorical figure to advertising’.258 Baudelaire is important to Benjamin in that his work carries a certain honesty about the experience of modernity: the deadening of sensibility which he analysed so intensively in the seventeenth century with Baudelaire becomes the perspective of death in life itself. This is the profound experience of alienation and dullness where a single desire is so overwhelming that it is experienced as shock. The poet becomes the material upon which the violences of the modern world stamp themselves on his body. His poetry is scandalous because it registers the cold and dry contours of commodity fetishism. In fact, when Les Fleurs du mal appeared in June 1857 it was considered such a scandal that it prompted Baudelaire to write to his mother Madame Aupick that ‘the proof of its positive value lies in all the abuse it has aroused … [t]hey refuse to give me credit for any creative gift or even knowledge of the language’.259 He was brought to trial along with his publisher for the ‘indecent realism’ of the collection and a 33-page booklet was produced with judgements about his work by some of his contemporaries. Barbey d’Aurevilly, who proclaimed him an atheist and modernist, was one amongst the few who admired his talent, describing it as ‘itself a flower of evil cultivated in the hothouses of Decadence … a Dante in the epoch of decline’,260 a description with which Baudelaire himself would not have disagreed. In his poem ‘Allegory’, published in that volume, Baudelaire describes one of those ‘hothouses’ in terms of the gaze of the prostitute, which for Benjamin represented the dialectical image par excellence in Baudelaire, flashing forth as it does the body and the commodity, sex and death in a vision of hell: What is purgatory, what is Hell To her? When she must go into the Night, Her eyes will gaze upon the face of Death without hate, without remorse – as one newborn.261

In a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal of 13 January, 1924, Benjamin, expressing a dissatisfaction with his own translation of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, said that he

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‘would like to journey forth once more in order to attempt to set foot in those linguistic realms in which the fashionable expression confronts the allegorised abstraction’.262 At the time he had been reading the poet for nine years, had published ‘The Task of the Translator’ the year before and was intimately familiar with the genius of his poetry. Baudelaire inspired Benjamin’s interest in Paris of the nineteenth century and became a key figure in the formulation of his theory of allegory.263 As with the Trauerspiel study, what is at issue in the nineteenth century as exemplified in Baudelaire is the question of experience, in this case the very specific form of experience contoured by the commodity fetishism of a burgeoning industrialised capitalism, and the representation of that experience. Benjamin notes that there is a change in the structure of experience in the nineteenth century: ‘[t]he change’, he says, ‘consisted in the fact that for the first time the form of the commodity imposed itself decisively on the work of art, and the form of the masses on its public’.264 This commodity imposition is an allegorical graphing into the very forms of art themselves, for example, in photography and cinematography. The Arcades Project was to recover the ‘primal history of the nineteenth century’ through the images selected and then arranged thematically. This kind of primal history, however, consists of a regrouping of primal history to include the new forms: Only where the nineteenth century would be presented as originary form of primal history – in a form, that is to say, in which the whole of primal history groups itself anew in images appropriate to that century – only there does the concept of the primal history of the nineteenth century have meaning.265

The nineteenth century relates to primal history as a historically specific regrouping based on dialectical images produced in that context: it becomes recognisable to humanity as a ‘particular dream image as such’. At this point it is the task of the historian to interpret the dream image.266 Thus, although Jauss credits Benjamin with distancing Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal from the modern aesthetic of art for art’s sake, and implicitly from T. S. Eliot’s view of him as a poet of morality,267 and no less Stephan George’s apotheosis of him as the beacon of modern aesthetics,268 he fails to appreciate the unique historical understanding in which the dialectical image (in Baudelaire’s case this is the woman as commodity or the prostitute) is central to the primal history of the nineteenth century. Jauss does point out that Benjamin allows us to read this poetry as historically produced, the experience of which ‘rendered the social process of the nineteenth century intelligible to art’. For Jauss, however, Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire as the poet who fixed the ‘productive energy of alienated man’, a production which acts as a testament to the ‘denatured existence of the urban masses’,269 is only half the story. For Benjamin, Baudelaire is an allegorical writer in terms of his style because his writing allegorically enacts ‘the final disappearance of “experience” ’ in the Second Empire and its replacement by ‘glum indifference, stupefied brooding, fixation on the endless outside of things’.270 Jauss claims that Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s theory of art reductively, in an authoritarian fashion discarding ‘Baudelaire’s insight into the “dual nature of the beautiful” ’ in which a concept of ‘classical art’ (which Benjamin claims



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Baudelaire should have been concerned with as the authoritative past of modern art) is redundant as a precursor because ‘the temporal or transitory beauty implicit in the concept of modernity engenders its own antiquity’.271 In short, Jauss reads a deliberate, even ‘violent tendency in Benjamin’s interpretation’ to efface and re-render Baudelaire’s work so as to marginalise his ‘radical and complete revaluation of nature’.272 In other words, he misses the ‘counteractive poetic process’ to the allegorising ‘gaze of the alienated man’ in Baudelaire’s poetry: for Jauss, Baudelaire’s correspondences also presuppose the harmonising and idealising strength of memory; no longer signs of a simultaneous unison of inward contemplation and outward nature, they are ‘data of remembrance’ or ‘commemorating signs of once successful experience’.273 Be that as it may, Benjamin reads ‘[e]verything for me becomes allegory’274 as a mobilising claim and proceeds to interpret an ‘allegorical genius’, one that ‘feeds on melancholy’, an experience that is as specific to the nineteenth century as it was to the seventeenth. But whereas in the seventeenth century melancholy signals the loss of sovereignty in the soul and in the world in the absence of eschatology, nineteenthcentury melancholy is marked by ‘profound alienation’.275 Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s allegorical vision as buttressed beside Neitzsche’s eternal return of the repressed and the revolutionary power of Blanqui’s satanic vision of the eternity of phantasmagoria. In Eternity through the Stars, an uncharacteristic text for Blanqui, written during the Paris Commune while he was sitting in prison, he presents a bleak picture of eternity as the return of the same on different planets forever repeating synonymous experiences: ‘[h]umanity figures there as damned’ says Benjamin, ‘[e]verything new it could hope for turns out to be a reality that has always been present … humanity will be prey to a mythic anguish so long as phantasmagoria occupies a place in it’.276 On this reading Baudelaire reproduces this vision in his poem ‘The Seven Old Men’ with the ghostly repetition of a wretched old man with eyes that looked as if their ‘pupils had been soaked in bile’: Then from the same hell came another, the same Eyes and beard and backbone, stick and rags – Nothing distinguished these centenarian twins Clumping identically toward an unknown goal.277

The importance of Baudelaire’s allegorical mode of expression is in the way it arrests ‘the productive energy of the individual alienated from himself – agnosticized and heightened through concretization’.278 It exemplifies a methodology prescribed in Thesis XVII of ‘On the Concept of History’. In that thesis two different kinds of history making are delineated: historicism, which is untheoretised and accumulative, an empty time filled with an aggregate of data and culminating in universal history; and materialist historiography which involves movement of thought in a constellation ‘saturated with tensions’ which comes to a sudden stop, the shock of which creates a crystallised monad. The first model is a version of enlightenment progress; the second implicitly denies the ability of that model to disengage from the flow of thought: The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognises the sign of a Messianic arrest

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Baudelaire’s own description of allegory in many ways takes Benjamin’s view of language to a logical conclusion. Baudelaire was an admirer of Alphonse Toussenel (1803–5), a writer whom Edouard Drumont called ‘one of the greatest prose writers of the century’.280 In a letter to Toussenel in which he extols him as a ‘supremely intelligent’ poet, Baudelaire describes the imagination as ‘the most scientific of faculties, for it alone can understand the universal analogy, or what a mystic religion calls correspondence’. He goes on to describe nature as ‘a language, an allegory, a mould, an embossing’ and then describes original sin as ‘form moulded on an idea’ just as ‘noxious, disgusting animals were, perhaps, merely the coming to life of man’s evil thoughts’ thus ‘the whole of nature participates in original sin.281 The comments are made in relation to Toussenel’s L’Esprit des bêtes: Zoologie passionnelle – Mammifères de France from which Benjamin quotes a passage on the mole that is said to be not ‘a single character’ but rather ‘the emblem of an entire social period – the period of the birth of industry’. Toussenel goes on to say that the Mole ‘does not symbolise a single vice, it symbolises them all; it is the most complete allegorical expression of the absolute predominance of brute force over the intellect’.282 Benjamin condenses this and a later (misquoted) passage: Many estimable analogists find a marked resemblance between moles, which upturn the soil and pierce passages of subterranean communication … and the monopolisers of railroads and stage routes … The extreme nervous sensibility of the mole, which fears the light … admirably characterises the obstinate obscurantism of those monopolisers of banking and transportation, who also fear the light.283

Conclusion Walter Benjamin’s thought is wide-ranging and compelling, sometimes frustrating but always thought provoking. This chapter has argued that his theory of modern allegory includes his own experience of modernity as a German-Jew at one of the most alienated moments of their history. The desire to penetrate into the source of reified experience in modernity is directed first through a theological framework which allows him to produce a theory of language, then through a theory of language which allows him to produce a theory of allegory and then through a theory of allegory which allows him to initiate a practice of materialist historiography. At no point in this trajectory of thinking does he reject earlier notions; rather he builds upon and expands these edifices. His thinking is, as Habermas points out, redemptive,



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but this is redemption of the past in the ‘now-time’ of the present and thus a ‘weak messianism’. Adorno thought that ‘the historical-philosophical aspect of the state’ was so lamentable that it just could not be redeemed.284 Indeed there are aspects of Benjamin’s work that leave the reader apprehensive, in particular in the way that he appropriates material from strong and systematic but politically dangerous thinkers and uses them for his own purposes. The question as to what extent Benjamin’s work becomes complicit with the atrocities of the time, however, is certainly a real one. This concern is implied in Derrida’s reading of ‘Critique of Violence’ when he despairs of what he calls the ‘Heideggerian … messianico-marxist or archeo-eschatological’ way of thinking: I don’t know whether from this nameless thing called the final solution one can draw something which still deserves the name of a lesson. But if there were a lesson to be drawn, a unique lesson among the always singular lessons of murder, from even a single murder, from all the collective exterminations of history … the lesson that we can draw today – and if we can do so then we must – is that we must think, know, represent for ourselves, formalise, judge the possible complicity between all these discourses and the worst (here the final solution).285

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From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man

Benjamin’s thinking, it could be argued, is precariously perched on the tipping point between a left linguistic materialism and the blood and soil politics of the far right, precisely the kind of tipping point that instantiated Schmitt’s own surrender to national socialism from his earlier resistance to liberalism. Though there is a riposte to Schmitt in ‘On the Concept of History’, like Schmitt, Benjamin never changes, or perhaps never had the chance to change, the fundamental architecture of his thinking. Interest in the work of both men has only continued to grow.1 However, Paul de Man’s reputation, no less than that of his uncle Hendrik de Man – who also capitulated to the far right from his third-way Marxism when he decided to lead Belgian socialists into German and European nationalism – has remained tainted since the 1988 presentation of his writing for Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land by Ortwin de Graph.2 And this is even despite his implicit critique of the theoretical co-ordinates that characterise his cultural nationalism of the 1940s. The high regard in which he was held during his life, as memorialised in a special issue of Yale French Studies called The Lesson of Paul de Man,3 was suddenly suspended. Since then some critics have come to view his work either as a form of charlatanism, something of an ‘intellectual imposture’, or a threat to the canonical authority of tradition, or lacking in historical or political commitment, or just plain ineffectual and worse ‘intent on establishing his own school of thought … that would be the sole representative of its genre’.4 These sentiments are typical of the paroxysms that rippled through the critical establishment at the time of the disclosure, sentiments that John Guillroy gleefully attributes to the fact that the name ‘de Man’ was rightly linked in the critical imaginary with a certain suspicion of theory5. In the area of mainstream romanticism, critics who viewed his work as associated with a pernicious form of Nietzscheanism, were suddenly vindicated as there was now obvious proof that his work was connected to his collaboration with Nazism: those romantic critics, on the other hand, who had grown up with the lessons of Paul de Man had to then clarify the relationships they had drawn between Nietzsche and such writers as Shelley, Keats and Blake – carefully distancing their readings from de Manian deconstruction.6 In this way it was possible to condemn him for suspicious motivations and maintain a resistance to what has been called his ‘allegorising crudeness’,7 meanwhile promulgating an unacknowledged and distorted version of his work.

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There is no doubt that the disclosure created a crisis in the critical establishment, a prefiguring of the rumblings about theory that would be caused by the Sokal affair in 1996. The disclosure made it possible for the faint-hearted to describe his work in its entirety as being ethically and politically dangerous. One particularly shameful example of such a dismissal, which was researched on the basis of hearsay rather than the actual engagement with the texts, is the poet David Lehman’s Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, a journalistic editorial embarrassingly bereft of informed academic argument, but doggedly determined to discredit literary theory generally, especially deconstruction. Despite the title, this is a book that only anecdotally refers to the work of de Man until half way through chapter five, where he superficially presents de Man’s reading of ‘Among School Children’ before launching into what can only be considered character assassination: ‘the remarkable thing’, he says, ‘about this deconstructive exercise is not that it contradicts our experience of the poem but that it displays the critic’s monumental conceit; it depicts Yeats as no more than an unwitting mouthpiece for the theories of Paul de Man.’8 Lehman, as Rudolphe Gasché has pointed out, was only one outstanding representative of a whole series of writers who took their lead from The New York Times, where the discovery of the wartime journalism was first reported, without having read the articles themselves.9 This is not to suggest that the case is a simple one and a clear schema for evaluating de Man’s work is certainly necessary. Christopher Norris does just that when he posits three possible approaches to the de Man revelations: first that after the wartime journalism ‘everything de Man went on to write must (so to speak) carry guilt by association and therefore be deeply suspect on ideological grounds’; secondly, a case could be made where ‘de Man’s later texts have absolutely nothing in common with his early writings, that in fact they exhibit an extreme resistance to precisely that form of dangerously mystified thinking, and should therefore be treated as belonging to a different order of discourse’; and thirdly, one could argue that ‘de Man’s later work grew out of an agonised reflection on his wartime experience, and can best be read as a protracted attempt to make amends (albeit indirectly) in the form of an ideological auto-critique’.10 Such clear-headedness, however, gets compromised, when Sean Burke, for example, wryly splices onto this analysis his own extreme argument, in a condemnation of what he calls ‘Dead Author’ theory, the category of literary theory into which he places de Man: ‘[t]here is at least one more form of possible response’, he says, ‘that of a radical anti-authorialism which would affirm that “Paul de Man” signifies nothing, and consequently there is no oeuvre.’11 Luckily, it is still possible to ask Norris what he thinks of Burke’s graphing together of their two arguments. But ‘Professah de Man’, well, ‘He Dead’!12 Gasché,13 among others, has pointed out that de Man’s was a ‘public trial’ which was without true judgement, an unnecessarily violent ‘overkill’ that used ‘plain slander’ to discredit the master and ‘target deconstruction’.14 Waters argues that the de Man furore arose because of journalists’ jealousy of a rising professorial class making claims to the evaluation of culture which had been traditionally its own remit, which coupled nicely with a brewing resentment of what was called de Man’s anti-humanism, and the perception that he was a foreigner ostensibly out to dupe the Americans with that



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oldest of dissembling devices, rhetoric.15 In Britain the response was more measured, and pace Burke, came mostly from the left. Thus, from that position, de Man’s handling of rhetoric as a dissembling agent of all positions, political or otherwise, was considered ahistorical precluding any rational effort to overcome forces of corruption, decay and political irresponsibility and execute a change in social circumstances. This lack of regard for history is regarded as a political position in itself and certainly not critical in a positive sense.16 One of the most disturbing consequences of all of this political squaring up, as Gasché quite rightly points out, is that an opportunity has been lost ‘to ask what in the humanist tradition itself made such collaboration possible or, at least, did not prevent it, and thus to ask the question concerning the temptations for which, insofar as we continue to claim that heritage, we ourselves might fall’.17 It can be argued that that is precisely the activity that de Man perceives himself as engaged in when he says in his essay on Montaigne that, ‘[t]he wretched myths that surround us are no sooner born than they degenerate into sclerotic bureaucracies. They must appeal to the most factitious loyalties – those to race and nation – in order to gain any vitality at all’.18 De Man’s theoretical enterprise is from the beginning an attempt to intervene in this degenerative process, one that runs through his work in the 1950s right up until the 1969 essay ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ when his work begins to demonstrate what Redfield calls ‘the technicity of the sign and the necessary precontamination of the proper’, that is, the inevitability that a certain exteriority constitutes any interior, linguistic, institutional or otherwise.19 That there is a strong affinity between de Man and Benjamin is in evidence throughout his work, a fact that is often acknowledged: however, de Man adjusts Benjamin’s thinking over the course of his career20 in ways that preclude all possibility of closing off understanding, something that Benjamin’s ‘weak messianic’ thinking still offers as a possibility. This is a complicated enterprise and it is refreshing to read Gasche’s exasperation when he confesses that the ‘inability to understand a subject matter or critical approach that, in principle, concerns one’s own field of competence is not exactly an academic virtue. Yet only few, if any, of those who have tried to read the writings of Paul de Man have been spared the experience, at least at first, of near total incomprehension.’21 He then goes on, however, to conduct, within the course of the book, a thorough engagement with his readings. De Man’s readings are ‘absolutely singular’ in the way that not only decries all efforts at totalisation, including ‘that which the systematic denunciation itself of totality may effect’.22 For this reason ‘it appears structurally impossible to make de Man’s theoretical enterprise close upon itself ’.23 How does he do it? Again, as Gasché says, ‘all of de Man’s concepts are allegorised, the concept of allegory being no exception’.24 What follows is a commentary on de Man’s treatment of allegory in the early essays of the 1950s and 60s as connected to inwardness and the question of transcendence, to the critic-linguistic, or deconstructive, turn characteristic of the 1970s and early 80s when he utilises Hegel and Heidegger to analyse language’s resistance to itself.

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I. De Man’s critical approach develops in its early stages of his mature work as a response to the New Criticism which had taken hold in the American universities after the Second World War. His focus is on inwardness as opposed to the kind of objectivisation and absolutism characteristic of that school, and early on his work shows affinities with that of Benjamin.25 Later, as Lindsay Waters points out, in the works that follow his essay on ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, specifically beginning with ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ when he refines his approach by transforming his focus on inwardness into a more technical analysis, Benjamin’s influence is more direct.26 At a basic level the two share a common position about the possibility of using writing for political purposes: it is in the interests of language as a medium, rather than as a vehicle for committed communication that Benjamin refuses to contribute to Buber’s Der Jude. De Man’s own experience of writing during the war made him resistant to all gestures in the direction of Sartrean commitment. But at a deeper level, both share an understanding of the problem of transcendence, though they begin by approaching it from different directions. Benjamin’s starting-point is the ‘pure language’ of linguistic being, the prelapsarian unity before the fall into human systems of signification. After the commencement of the ‘overnaming’ that produces human language, allegory as a ‘graphic art’ takes over and makes transcendence a problem that can only be addressed in a piecemeal fashion with translation. This question of transcendence is de Man’s starting point; however, his thinking begins, not from the perspective of language as such, but from that of an existential predicament. ‘Montaigne and Transcendence’ was written in 1953, two years before Suhrkamp Verlag published Benjamin’s Schriften edited by Theodor and Gretel Adorno which contained The Origin of German Tragic Drama, a work which had a great influence on de Man. That Benjamin’s work was in circulation before that time is evident because writers such as Peter Szondi were already referring to Benjamin before the release of the two-volume work.27 De Man’s own essay can be read as something of a vindication of Benjamin’s thesis on allegory as the unredemptive graphing process of signification, propelled by the death mask of negation. The essay depicts Montaigne as presenting ‘one of the fullest and profoundest descriptions of the difficult problem of transcendence, the problem of our ambiguous relations with our own being’.28 De Man reads Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond as the attempt to address this problem from an existential or experiential perspective, its combined – epistemological, ethical and aesthetic – form rather than as a metaphysical predicament. This experiential perspective is described as an ‘existential psychology of reflective consciousness’29 which takes its starting-point from ‘the subjective desire to know, and also as the discovery of the totality of knowledge bequeathed us by our ancesters’.30 Montaigne’s primary insight is that the elaborate apparatuses that have been historically erected to present the absolute are products of human desire, without rational principle, riven through with contradictions, unanchored and free from supernatural direction. ‘Their mainspring’ says de Man, ‘is an entirely subjective intentionality; man thinks, not because truth compels him to do so, but



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because thought affords him satisfaction.’31 Thus at the basis of all knowledge is, not rationality, but corporeal desire and the intention to acquire satisfaction, pleasure. The mechanism by which this desire to know is satisfied is what Montaigne (and de Man) seeks to understand. Paradoxically, desire, which is corporeal and fluid, can only achieve its goal (to know) through its own destruction in the fixity of laws, a freeze-framing in subjectivity which is the opposite of its true character. ‘In every act of knowledge there is a profound flaw that leads to an indissoluble dilemma: its object can be known only at the price of the existence of the knowing agent (cognitive consciousness).’32 Thus at the heart of objective knowledge is first temptation and then sacrifice through destruction of the desiring subject, and the thinking being, to the system. The temptation is both a threat, the threat of destroying being, and a failure, because the move merely transforms subjectivity into another mode, rather than facilitating the grasp of objectivity. The corollary to this insight is that subjectivity itself is only knowable by the mind on the tipping point of its destruction and so the mind becomes aware of both the endless series of failures to know but also its power to record them. Thus ‘just when the mind falls into despair of its impotence, it regains all its elasticity in perceiving this very impotence’.33 De Man reads a tonal change in Montaigne’s discourse as he lucidly and wittily prepares to relate how he knows his knowledge is impotent. What this indicates, for de Man, is that the mind can only legitimate itself ‘when it ceases to be pure’.34 In this Montaigne implicitly understands the conflict between the corporeality of subjectivity – emotional, flighty, given to moods and the object of the mind’s reflection – and the mind which can only mark its own variability, divesting subjectivity of a congruous and constant existence by imposing law on the reflection. The consequence of this insight is a sort of transcendence which denies rational transcendence and preserves pleasure – an ironic temperament, lucid, curious, one perpetually renewed through ignorance. This is a phenomenological frame of mind, one that exists in humility, descriptive rather than legislative. Ethically, this kind of descriptive transcendence is relativistic, subject to the context and unable to be transferred beyond that particularity. However, just as the ‘gesture’ of reason is preserved in this, so is the ethical, for although it must forsake the absolute in the interest of this negative knowledge, it attaches itself to ritual. ‘Ritual’, says de Man, ‘is what remains of morality when it is drained of absolutes, just as phenomenology is what remains of knowledge when it is drained of objective truth.’35 Habermas would call Montaigne conservative, as de Man does, but perhaps for slightly different reasons than those attributed to Benjamin. Nevertheless, Montaigne does not believe in the historical overcoming of the ideologies of his time in the revelation of an absolute. De Man reads this as a superior position taken at the time of post-medieval Christianity, one that modern times have lost. What for Benjamin is the experience of allegory as a process of graphing one form onto another which changes the human sensorium, de Man here calls paradoxical transcendence; the way it is achieved is through a non-violent process of continuous graphing [my emphasis], a praxis rather than expression, but, as with Benjamin’s insight, neither is it an activity directed toward a reader:

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Thus transcendence is the grace of acknowledging the failure of knowledge, morality and aesthetics. Here Montaigne becomes for de Man the contradiction to Benjamin’s allegorical angel of history, and the differences are marked: His tense is exclusively the present; he moves unceasingly on the narrow ridge where no temporal density can accumulate, where he remains open, so to speak, to every wind that blows. The past collapses straight away into oblivion, because it works loose from the subjectivity of the immediate; … The future, it goes without saying remains open; no conclusion is definitive, and contradiction is the mind’s law ….37

Whereas Benjamin’s angel has a face turned towards the past and sees ‘a single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it at his feet’, Montaigne, the philosopher writing, ‘moves unceasingly’ on a resistant threshold between two domains that have fallen ineluctably away; and whereas for Benjamin’s angel, ‘a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings’ and ‘is so strong that the angel can no longer close them’, Montaigne writing maintains a fluidity in motion which cannot acquire ‘temporal density’ and so is open to every blowing wind; and whereas for Benjamin’s angel, the ‘storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned’ and ‘the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky’, for Montaigne writing, the past falls away into absolute forgetfulness and the future is, not uncertain, but open; and whereas Benjamin’s angel witnesses an accumulating pending disaster which the enlightenment names progress, for Montaigne, writing produces no conclusions, just contradictions, ‘the mind’s law’. Montaigne’s conservativism is therefore experienced as the ritual practices of his Christian faith, an orthodoxy that allowed for the response to the demands of the moment, rather than to demands born out of the knowledge of truth. Hence his mood is one of irony as he describes the myriad of structures which are created in the name of dominance. This mood is literary insofar as it is imbedded in the enigma of life, philosophical in its despair in ever achieving an integrated and coherent metaphysics. What is truly idiosyncratic about Montaigne, then, is the manner in which he surrenders the demand for knowledge, for an objective ethics, and finally aesthetics, to the absolute present, and not the present of experiencing, but the present of writing. The space between the temporality of experience which might embody content, and the act of writing is closed. In other words, it is through writing that Montaigne is othered – ‘elsewhere’ constantly in motion in the making and breaking of forms of subjectivity. What de Man reads in Montaigne’s work is the persistent activity of



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remaking form out of form, writing to the crisis of his inner phenomenal world which takes the place of the search for the absolute. This kind of paradoxical transcendence requires a ‘will to change’: in this, ontology is not a static or permanent aspect of existence, but is very much historical. ‘The Inward Generation’ (1955) is a Hegelian reading of European history since 1800 which evokes the idea of the ‘will to change’ as a means of addressing the augmented crisis of the inner phenomenal world characteristic of an era. This era includes the present, the pre-war years of the 1930s and 40s and extends back to the romanticism of the early nineteenth century, that is, the middle to late periods of modernity. As with Benjamin’s methodology, developed, following Alois Riegl, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, de Man turns to marginal writers as those most likely to yield information about the conventions of the day, so as to ‘meet problems from the inside, as they appeared to these writers themselves’.38 Over the course of this time changes occurred at the level of subjectivity, induced by the dialectic between the experience of sterility and the ‘will to change’ in the minds of cultural elites, which produced vigorous creative productions combined with political commitment. De Man reads the movement of subjectivity into a system of laws characteristic of this historical context: writers took shelter in political systems and aesthetic orders meanwhile forgetting the ontological questions that gave rise to them in the first place. ‘Political systems of the left and right’, says de Man, ‘and literary experiments that had originated before them, provided an organised framework within which they could fit and act, without really returning to the questions out of which these systems and experiments had arisen.’39 When the threat of death, and the protracted anxiety that went along with it, became a reality with the outbreak of WWII, the attendant mechanisation and automaticism turned the ‘defence of form’ into ‘the defence of being itself ’.40 Is this a hidden justification for the wartime journalism, or a warning to his contemporaries about the dangers inherent in the temptation to permanence? Here, for de Man, in this historical atmosphere, aesthetic forms are consistently honed in the context of political upheaval. This atmosphere, which accounted for the plurality once projected at the beginning of this period, in art as in philosophy, and addressed in attempts to create new beginnings, had run aground in the 50s in America with an elite who had abandoned the ‘will to change’ despite the moral and intellectual imperatives. This indifference manifests as a questioning of the value of historical change combined with the ‘admitted failure of the imagination to conceive of any change that would be worth the effort’. The danger of this suppression of the rebellious vitalism reflective of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is that it threatens to sever the links that tie the past to the present: When are we being deceived: is it when we try to think within a context of death and rebirth, failure and its transcendence, nothing and being – or is it when we abandoned ourselves to a stream of passive permanence? Today, we seem inclined to prefer acceptance; but can we be certain that, in doing so, we are not about to abdicate because we are no longer able to stand the strain of the increasing

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At this stage he reads this activity as linked with Hegel’s unhappy consciousness: the awareness of separation leads to inwardness which leads to history. De Man makes the point that the construction of any political, literary or philosophical system which would pretend to solve the issues that arise from our awareness of separation, is a mechanism for avoidance. In the context of American formalism this would apply to the Cleanth Brooks’ Well-Wrought Urn approach where ‘there is such a thing called poetry’ and ‘there are general criteria against which poems may be measured’42 and one makes no apology for absolutism. This kind of claim is a form of conservative nihilism, a turning away from consciousness toward nothingness – a succumbing to the temptation of permanence. Nihilism removes the conceptualisation of history from poetry and makes it impossible to address the necessary question of being. What distinguishes the poets of the 1950s from the romantics is that they have conceded to the failure of the imagination and the loss of power of the aesthetic, forsaken history and the ‘will for change’, as well as abandoned the imperative to address the ontological crisis which distinguishes some of the truly great poetical and philosophical works of this era. The result is a recoil into the state of ‘passive permanence’ where the ‘flow of language … covers up the sterile silence underneath’43. This retreat from the continued attempt to overcome the ontological crisis makes it attractive to, and easily recuperated for, a new kind of conservative institution. Unlike Habermas’s belief that conservativism is the nihilism of the posthistoire, in de Man’s terms what is conservative is the institutionalisation of permanence, the passive and self-assured belief that all that can be achieved has been achieved, an entrenchment in the unchanging. The same intuition that lay behind the chronicling of nineteenth-century materials in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, inspires de Man to describe the historical moment at the beginning of the nineteenth-century as a time when ‘a deep separation between man’s inner consciousness and the totality of what is not himself ’44 emerges and there is an attempt to overcome this profound alienation through materialisation in form. And this change persists, though the moment of recognition does not. This is the moment when technology reaches a particular stage of development and actually changes the nature of sensory experience itself. Like Benjamin, de Man, at this stage of his thinking, would have viewed the new millennium with the emergence of systems of virtual reality as another transformative moment in the human sensorium. But the specific time that de Man refers to here, which registers in the work of poets and philosophers such as Rousseau, Hölderlin and Hegel, involves the ‘specific cluster of ideas that leads from the concept of separation to that of inwardness, and from inwardness to history’.45 The resultant anxiety that such a transformation produces should not be managed with nihilistic techniques for avoidance, strategies for achieving permanence (such as National Socialism, perhaps?) but mastered through the utmost awareness – truth achieved in ‘intense mental concentration’. Here again, de Man signals a departure from Benjamin, who thought that ‘tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points



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cannot be performed solely by optical means – that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually – taking their cue from tactile reception – through habit.’46 For de Man, the anxiety produced at these times must be endured, and indeed can be endured, with a poetic understanding of the truth as transience, in which there is a recognition that even the ontological is historical. Thus with intense mental concentration poetry [t]hinks of truth not as stability and rest but as a balance of extreme tensions, that, like a drawn bow, achieves immobility when it is bent to the point of breaking. It needs all the consciousness it can find and shuns whatever tries to dim the vision it has left.47

II. All of the essays published in the Critical Writings, apart from the ‘Forward to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony’ were worked out between the years 1953 and 1970. They are preparatory critical tools for the work that follows. Although Rosiek has argued that Benjamin’s influence begins with his 1960 PhD dissertation Mallarmé, Yeats, and the Post-Romantic Predicament,48 as has been shown, even the early works of the 1950s can be usefully juxtaposed with Benjamin’s thinking. His influence can also be discerned in many of the essays collected in Blindness and Insight. ‘Criticism and Crisis’ (1967), for example, abounds with inferences which are anasemically organised around the question of the temporality of experience, the historical emergence of certain forms of criticism, and the blindnesses that accompany their most elucidating insights.49 The movement of the essay itself is not straightforward and indeed one of its abiding themes is the impossibility of making headway or ‘progress’ when it comes to analysing the status of criticism at any one moment in time, if ever. It starts with a philosophical meditation on the experience of change in the humanities, especially as it differs in the American, British and European contexts, and the various influences that can affect temporal perspective. Understanding this difference in the experience of change must also account for the acutely felt ideological and historical importance of methodology in Europe, which is not weighed as heavily in either America or Britain. From the beginning de Man makes it clear that these differences in the experiences of change do not combine neatly into a narrative of historical process, because historical changes are not like changes in nature, and the vocabulary of change and movement as it applies to historical process is a mere metaphor, not devoid of meaning, but without an objective correlative that can unambiguously be pointed to an empirical reality, as when we speak of a change in the weather or a change in a biological organism.50

In the context of describing Continental criticism as a motivated methodological assault on the notion of a transcendent poetic consciousness, that is, a kind of

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consciousness that exists removed from the complications of everyday language use and is not plagued by the problem of making experience coincide with the representation of experience – he makes a transition to language which can be defined in terms of everyday use and applied to literature. Social language is ‘an intricate system of rhetorical devices designed to escape from the direct expression of desires that are, in the fullest sense of the term unnameable – not because they are ethically shameful, but because unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility’.51 Here de Man addresses an aspect of Benjamin’s theory of language in which the question of name-ability is central. The task of naming is, in Benjamin’s theological understanding of linguistic being as ‘origin’, a divinely inspired human task which depends on human receptivity to the communicability of the muteness of ‘things’ toward the ‘word language’ of man. After the Fall, the ‘blissful Adamite spirit of language’, the name-language characteristic of the paradisiacal state loses its immanent magic and with the knowledge of good and evil, becomes nameless, a vehicle for communicating something other than itself, leading to the expression of mourning that is elicited as a result of the multiplication of languages and subsequent ‘overnaming’52. De Man translates this model into a thoroughly secular, representational one by denying that the escape from the direct expression of desires via rhetoric is related to the shame attached to the knowledge of good and evil: desires are not nameless, but ‘unnameable’, due to the impossibility of moving from sensibility to intelligibility without the mediation of signification, that is the kind of language that Benjamin associates with the Fall. To name a desire, from de Man’s perspective, would be to give it a kind of permanence that would cancel it out as a desire: it is in the very nature of desire to elude name-ability. The tendency towards communicability of the mental being of different expressions of mental life, in Benjamin, that is their ‘linguistic being’,53 is transformed in de Man into form: literature is a ‘form of language’ just as ‘all other art forms, including music, are in fact proto-literary languages’.54 Thus, while for Benjamin ‘overnaming’, the condition of possibility for the ‘linguistic being of melancholy’, is the ground for the allegorical mode of existence, for de Man, at this early stage of his thinking, allegory is integral to the interpretation of everyday language, but it is an impossible task: ‘[t]he interpretation of everyday language’, he says, ‘is a Sisyphean task, a task without end and without progress, for the other is always free to make what he wants differ from what he says he wants’.55 What post-Saussurean linguistics and anthropology do to prevent falling into rhetorical complications is to create a meta-language in order to preserve rationality and this imperative gets imported into literature. The effect of this move is to highlight the structural underpinnings of historical terms – for instance ‘romantic’ in which the aesthetic concept of the ‘Beautiful Soul’, ‘the figura of a privileged kind of language’ – promotes an unproblematic merger of sign and meaning: Its outward appearance receives its beauty from an inner glow (or feu sacré) to which it is so finely attuned that, far from hiding it from sight, it gives it just the right balance of opacity and transparency, thus allowing the holy fire to shine without burning.56



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During the course of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this high point of romantic delusion is gradually demystified in literature itself – in the work of writers like Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust – where the whole concept of the speaking subject is gradually compromised: structuralism provides precisely the meta-language ‘without speaker’ that corresponds to the insights made available in these writers. This demystification is, however, not really demystification or a resolution to the problem of the non-correspondence of the sign with meaning: rather this move is a rhetorical move which merely installs literature itself in the place of the sublime poetic consciousness. By way of example, de Man cites Husserl’s lecture delivered in May 1935, two years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, called ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’. Husserl himself, despite the overt call for Selbstverhülltheit – that is his call for philosophical knowledge to come into being by turning back upon itself – is unsuccessful in eliminating his own self ’s hiding from the light he casts: his own work, which juxtaposes non-European and European cultures, endows Europe solely with the privileged capacity for philosophical thought. What this example indicates for de Man is that ‘crisis-determined’ statements have a structure which is paradoxical: the truth about the coming into being of philosophy is delivered in language that exemplifies what the truth should eliminate. ‘The rhetoric of crisis’, he says, ‘states its own truth in the mode of error. It is itself radically blind to the light it emits.’57 Underpinning this double model of representation, that of the dialectic of insight and blindness, of course, is Husserl’s own pathos in witnessing ‘a moment when Europe was about to destroy itself as centre in the name of its unwarranted claim to be the centre’.58, 59 Norris calls this a necessary blindness, one that might be ‘read in reverse, as yielding the surely more hopeful lesson that insight may indeed come about by reflection on those same deeply-ingrained sources of error and partisan judgement’.60 The ruse of demystification that Husserl exemplifies is not, for de Man, a personal failing, but related to the non-coincidence of sign and meaning. Literature is the form of language that has immanent knowledge of this ruse precisely because it is the condition of its own possibility. But perhaps that is too Kantian: fictional narrative knows its own being as inwardly directed toward its own fictional nature, which is entirely different from perception of empirical reality. Fiction ‘transcends the notion of nostalgia or a desire, since it discovers desire as a fundamental pattern of being that discards any possibility of satisfaction’.61 The impossibility of satisfaction in fiction is not experienced as a result of an absence, but as a presence. The ‘presence’ is that of nothingness, the void within the self, experienced in a total detachment from the empirical world. For de Man, poetic naming language is not a divinely ordained paradisiacal ‘task’, but a compulsion, a compulsion to name the ‘void with ever renewed understanding’. Fiction ‘knows and names itself as fiction’62 and fiction names with great gusto especially in times of crisis. This notion of naming with gusto in times of crisis is a secular reiteration of Benjamin’s description of the baroque as extracting ‘a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation’ thus bringing them ‘violently into the light of day’.63 But for de Man, the performative power of naming, in his terms the power of repeated positing, shatters all aspirations to critical demystification: when critics claim to have made literature ‘scientific’ (as

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with approaches like structural anthropology, Saussurean linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis which work because they effectively annihilate the literary, and by this we might read the tropological, especially allegorically performative potential in literature, that linguistic secret agent that invades and secretly corrupts the integrity of systems), they have actually been surrounded by the power of poetic naming. The question of the ontological status of the self that these approaches preclude, leads, for de Man, to the realisation that literature, itself, is ‘a primary source of knowledge’.64. This reference to the ‘source’ of knowledge as related to the performativity of poetic naming rather than to the ‘metaphysics’ of foundational systems or structures, is also a reference to transience, to temporal temporariness, and ultimately finitude and death. What Martin Hägglund describes as Derrida’s ‘radical atheism’, that is, ‘the argument that everything that can be desired is mortal in essence’ and that ‘[t]he double bind of temporal finitude is at work in every moment of life’,65 applies to de Man in relation to reading. ‘I intend’, he says in an interview with Robert Moynihan, ‘to take the divine out of reading. The experience of the divine is one that is totally conceivable, but which I don’t think is compatible with reading.’66 De Man tries to show that this desire for metaphysical closure, this effort to control and objectify literature, to keep it quarantined from the destructive affects of allegorical performativity by pressing it ever more densely into form, is ultimately a failure. Thus, in ‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism’(1966), which contains his first actual citation of Benjamin’s theory of allegory, de Man engages the question of allegory directly. The problem he identifies in this essay, one that is associated with not only New Criticism, but French structuralism and French existential criticism, is the question of the autonomy of the literary text and the question of intention in relation to the poetic act. Wimsatt gets through the problem of intention by bracketing it, making it a fallacy to get to meaning through intention, but then goes on to ‘hypostatize’ the act making it, as de Man notes, a natural object, thus preserving the link between subjectivity and language. Northrop Frye goes even further in describing the literary act as ‘the intention to abolish intention’ and uses the metaphor of ‘taking aim’ as a model for understanding intentionality. De Man makes a crucial qualifying distinction: When a hunter takes aim at a rabbit, we may presume that his intention is to eat or sell the rabbit and in that case the act of taking aim is subordinated to another intention that exists beyond the act itself. But when he takes aim at an artificial target, his act has no other intention than aim-taking for its own sake and constitutes a perfectly closed and autonomous structure. The act reflects back upon itself and remains circumscribed within the range of its own intent. This is indeed a proper way of distinguishing between different intentional objects such as the tool (the gun that takes aim at the rabbit) and the toy (the gun that takes aim at the clay pipe). The aesthetic entity definitely belongs to the same class as the toy, as Kant and Schiller knew well before Huizinga.67

The distinction between tool and toy in the understanding of technē is important here: Huizinga, someone Benjamin also read with interest and included in The Arcades



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Project, argued in Homo Ludens68 that play, the world of the toy, was integral to human culture and he gives it the kind of autonomy that de Man is here speaking of: play is disinterested, demands and creates order, is of a different order to ordinary life and is absolute freedom. Moreover, the intentionality involved in play promotes repetition and continuation; the intentionality involved in using a tool has a final outcome, an endpoint, and a closure. The problem with confusing these two forms of intentionality, that is, in mistakenly applying the intentionality associated with tools to literature is that, like the rabbit, you kill it: in homogenising literature, in ‘classifying the whole of literature into one single thing’ one turns it into ‘a gigantic cadaver’.69 The desire to maintain the formal unity of the text independent of intentionality inevitably fails in that the supposed affinity between art and the natural world finally ‘explodes’ as the interpretations lead to discontinuity and ambiguity. To address this problem American New Criticism, therefore, quite spontaneously, readjusts its critical compass and moves into the area of hermeneutics and a wholly new model of coherence. Hermeneutics, however, also involves circularity: to interpret something implies a foreknowledge of what is already there, hence interpretation is merely disclosure, but not just disclosure of something that exists, but disclosure of something that ‘exists for us’. Thus hermeneutics also implies a totalisation as true understanding must at some point merge with foreknowledge and close the circle. And this makes the act of criticism an act of repetition rather than a critical act as such: ideally, ‘[p]oetry is the foreknowledge of criticism. Far from changing or distorting it, criticism merely discloses poetry for what it is’.70 There is a kind of self-fulfilling philosophy involved here: forgotten in this formula is the problem of temporality. The dialectic between foreknowledge and interpretation can never achieve an end point, because ‘form is never anything but a process on the way to its completion’.71 Understanding is not achieved in the end because the horizon of expectation is time: ‘[t]he act of understanding is a temporal act that has its own history, but this history forever eludes totalisation’.72 Thus de Man outlines three problems associated with American formalism which also apply to French structuralism: ‘the existence and nature of the constitutive subject, the temporal structure of the act of interpretation, the necessity for a distinctly literary mode of totalisation’.73 Structuralism’s moves into existentialism and then phenomenology fail because, once again, ‘literature does not fulfil a plenitude but originates in the void that separates intent from reality. The imagination takes its flight only after the void, the inauthenticity of the existential project has been revealed.’74 This separation of intent from reality, that is the loss of reality, exemplified in the ‘explosion’ of meaning in American New Criticism, a loss of reality understood by many great writers including Baudelaire, is a void that marks the onset of the poetic ‘state of mind’. De Man calls this the allegorical and he alludes to Benjamin whom he says ‘defined allegory as a void “that signifies precisely the non-being of what it represents” ’.75 De Man does not actually include the citation for this last quotation in his essay, but it comes from the last section of the Origin book, ‘Allegory and Trauerspiel’. In fact he actually mistranslates this passage: ‘Und zwar bedeutet es genau das Nichtsein dessen, was es vorstellt’76 is translated correctly in Osborne as ‘[i]t means precisely the

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non-existence of what it presents’.77 Pausing for a moment on this statement, it might be useful to return to the scene of the accident, so to speak, and query this reading of Benjamin, which is not only wrong, but does a violence to the original. In the last chapter it was mentioned that Giorgio Agamben, in his book State of Exception, argued that the editors of Gesammelte Schriften had wrongly transcribed ‘Es gibt eine barocke Eschatologie’ as ‘Es gibt keine barocke Eschatologie’. In that chapter it was argued that the whole trajectory of the argument in The Origin of German Tragic Drama did not lead to that conclusion, and that man’s fallen condition was inherently allegorical and mournful precisely because there was no possibility for divine intervention, no eschatology. This conclusion would support de Man’s reading of allegory as signifying a void, though ‘the non-existence of what it presents’ is very different from ‘the non-being of what it represents’. However, the ending of the Origin is ambivalent, presenting an unredeemed earthly existence together with the possibility that melancholy can produce an awakening of the allegorist, a reversal of the ‘fall from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of the bottomless depths’ through a rediscovery of itself, ‘not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of heaven’: … this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void [my emphasis] in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.78

From this it would appear that there is, as Rosiek avers, a ‘return (Wiederkehr) of eschatology’,79 which makes de Man’s more Heideggerian translation of ‘non-existence’ as ‘non-being’, puzzling. Here Benjamin specifically says, and he is very careful with language, that the allegorical, along with evil, turn out to deny the void (my emphasis), as an illusion or perhaps a dream. Agamben glosses this denial as related to the concept of the ‘state of exception’: in Thesis VIII in ‘On the Concept of History’, Benjamin effects a ‘small adjustment’ on Schmitt’s statement that ‘the rule as such lives off the exception alone’ by writing ‘the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule’. This change can be viewed in terms of the relationship between ‘the arrival of the Messiah and the limit concept of State power’. The Messiah, his thesis goes, is ‘the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it’.80 He refers to the character of the Torah, understood by Cabalists to be an unordered meaningless miscellany of letters which are available for ordering, as ‘being in force without significance’ and then describes two aspects of the Torah: one is in the ‘state of creation’ which corresponds to the Tree of Knowledge of evil and death after the Fall – ‘the law of the unredeemed world’; the other is in the ‘state of emanation’ which corresponds to the Tree of Life – the pure and sacred meaning of the Torah in ‘its original fullness’81. The original law before the Fall, then, is no ‘signifying proposition, but … a commandment that commands nothing’.82 He argues that these two orders of law do not follow chronologically in Benjamin’s thought, nor are they parallel worlds, but follow the formula ‘there is-not’.83 He references Benjamin’s statement in



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Thesis VIII where he distinguishes between the ‘real state of exception’ and the real state of exception ‘in which we live’,84 the former of which has two inflections, one related to ‘historical time and its law’ and the other which ‘puts an end to it’.85 Only in this way can the event of the Messiah coincide with historical time yet at the same time not be identified with it, effecting in the eskhaton that ‘small adjustment’ in which the messianic kingdom consists.86 Thus in his translation of Benjamin’s allegory as a ‘void that signifies precisely the non-being of what it represents’ de Man, too, makes a ‘small adjustment’ which effectively removes the messianic element in the reading of allegory: what is for Benjamin a ‘non-existence’ of what is presented, that is the dizzying fall into allegory and the subsequent emergence of the allegorist who reads the world as dead, for de Man becomes representation which signals ‘non-being’, a disjunction in the very centre of signification itself. De Man’s turn to a more technical handling of the movement from tropes to allegory soon follows this adjustment. The 1969 ground-breaking essay ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ replicates the argument that Benjamin lays out in the ‘Allegory and Trauerspiel’ section of The Origin of German Tragic Drama: the study of rhetoric had been eclipsed in the nineteenth-century as a critical vocabulary influenced by subjectivism and romantic aesthetics actively supplanted interest in the workings of tropes. This was accomplished in the main through a distinction made between symbol and allegory. Querying this distinction, and the origins of the distinction which had become common in Germanistik by this time, de Man cites Gadamer’s Truth and Method which contains a long section on the distinction and historical division between symbol and allegory extolling en route the brilliance of Kant’s own contribution to this division in §59 of the Critique of Judgement where he describes symbolic representation as indirect and merely for reflection, different and disconnected from the schematism of the concept: ‘[h]e thus does justice to the theological truth that had found its scholastic form in the analogia entis and keeps human concepts separate from God’.87 In isolating the symbol, Kant makes it available for a nineteenth century aesthetics which prioritised the ‘freedom of the symbol-making function of the mind’.88 De Man, following Gadamer, queries whether the symbol as a basis for aesthetics is still appropriate and proceeds to pursue the problem in English and French literature. The determination to theorise a concrete difference between the two fails in Coleridge: first he structures symbol as a synecdoche in making life and form organically the same such that ‘material perception and the symbolic imagination are continuous’.89 In contrast to this living specimen Coleridge makes allegory simultaneously a machine, an abstraction and a phantom. But in articulating symbol it too acquires insubstantiality, a ‘translucence of the eternal through the temporal’. On close inspection it turns out that figural language generally is translucent; symbol and allegory have a transcendental source and are effectively indistinguishable. The recuperation of Coleridge into Anglo-American criticism, however, involves a slight adjustment – translucence turns into synthesis as the dialectic between subject and object becomes a symbolic event related to perception and ultimately to an aesthetic that enables a greater intimacy

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between mind and nature than was possible with the mere ‘associative’ aesthetics characteristic of the previous century. When Coleridge transforms Bowles’s sonnet ‘To the River Itchen’ (1789) with his own ‘To the River Otter’ (1796) Wimsatt will say that ‘[o]ne notices immediately … that the speaker has his eye more closely on the object. There are more details. The picture is more vivid, a fact which according to one school of poetics would in itself make the sonnet superior.’90 There is greater attention to the finer details of the natural world in Coleridge’s poem, and for Wimsatt this leads to greater inwardness. The movement, then, from an eighteenth-century neo-classical aesthetics to romantic aesthetics involves a shift in practice and critical vocabulary from ‘associative analogy’ to something more ‘vital’ with ‘affinity’ and ‘sympathy’.91 The trajectory of the poetry of this time, according to the critics following the theory of the poets themselves, is from a relationship between mind and nature to an ‘intersubjective, interpersonal relationship that, in the last analysis, is a relationship of the subject toward itself ’.92 Ultimately, de Man points out, the relationship between the mind and nature involves a tension where various strategies for achieving a spiritual transcendence creates an impasse in terms of which of the two should be prioritised: [i]s romanticism a subjective idealism, open to all the attacks of solipsism that, from Hazlitt to the French structuralists, a succession of de-mystifiers of the self have directed against it? Or is it instead a return to a certain form of naturalism after the forced abstraction of the Enlightenment, but a return which our urban and alienated world can conceive of only as a nostalgic and unreachable past?93

The lack of clarity on this question is shared in the poets and critics alike: Earl Wasserman, for example, not one for being hamstrung by a Humpty Dumpty theory of semantic wages as regards ‘romanticism’, reads in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, different answers to the question of how ‘subject and object meet in a meaningful relationship’.94 Coleridge himself, de Man points out, resolves the problem of the tension in the romantic image by advocating a merging with the object through making it a subject with the characteristics of a favourite dog, of a friend and also of God! Thus poets and critics seem unable to reach a consensus, suggesting that they were really ‘unable to move beyond the analogism that they inherited from the eighteenth century’.95 Here de Man turns the problem around: this problem emerges because of the assumed predominance of the symbol in romantic diction, therefore it is necessary to call that presupposition into question. In the next part of this important essay, de Man analyses French literary history to find out if this subject/object dialectic is also central. What he finds in French literature, is that ‘romantic’ is indeed used to describe images of landscapes which express ‘the intimate proximity between nature and its beholder in a language that evokes the material shape of the landscape as well as the mood of its inhabitants’.96 In seeking to learn the historical origin of this priority of the subject which desires stability in a union with nature he goes to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. This is certainly a well-chosen novel for analysing the relationship between inner states and the natural world. For one thing it is an epistolary novel that thematises reading itself: Julie and Saint-Preux teach each other to read as well as love. But it was also a



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text that would, as Robert Darnton says, explode ‘the conventions established at the height of the classical period by Boileau’, revolutionise ‘the relation between reader and text’ meanwhile recovering an older way of reading that had existed in the two previous centuries in which reading was to ‘absorb the unmediated Word of God’.97 This is not the direction de Man’s reading takes, however. What de Man finds in this novel are two types of landscape, one depicting error, such as the Meillerie episode in part four, and one depicting virtue, such as Julie’s refuge, her Wolmar estate garden virtue, which ‘[o]n the allegorical level … functions as the landscape representative of the “beautiful soul” ’.98 In fact the Meillerie episode is more alluded to than depicted in the novel, but there is an episode described as part of the journey to see Julie again after their long separation.99 Nevertheless, de Man conducts a complex reading of the novel whereby these two gardens, the former conveying the ‘parallel movements’ between subjective passion and nature, and the latter, the portrayal of Julie’s garden, which lacks personal expression of a subjectivity observing and instead allegorises Defoe’s puritan spiritual autobiography Robinson Crusoe along with the erotic garden of the first part of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la rose.100 Thus, for de Man, the tension in this novel is not between a subject and nature, but between two different languages, and two different value systems, one symbolic and one allegorical. Since the novel is resolved in the renunciation of the symbolic world of cultic presence, the ‘priority of an allegorical over a symbolic diction’ is established.101 With this de Man is able to build upon the insights established with Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study extending the time frame, making it specific to the French context and then generalising it to include all of European literature: ‘[s]imilar allegorising tendencies, though often in a very different form, are present not only in Rousseau but in all European literature between 1760 and 1800. Far from being a mannerism inherited from the exterior aspects of the baroque and the rococo, they appear at the most original and profound moments in the works, when an authentic voice becomes audible.’102 In this there is an ‘unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny’, but more than this, the allegory depicted is of a different character to the dogmatic medieval allegory: ‘it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition … of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is the essence of this sign to be pure anteriority.’103 Thus, de Man concludes that a closer reading of pre-romantic writers reveals that there existed an understanding about symbol and allegory and their relationship: symbol posits identification, allegory distance. In establishing a language in the void that opens between the self and the non-self, allegory keeps available the knowledge of the non-identification of self and other. The defining character of romanticism, then, is not some sort of dialectical relationship between subject and object, but a conflict between ‘a conception of the self seen in its authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge’.104 The final section of the rich essay deals with irony, and the approach is not the kind of ‘historical’ approach used in the analysis of symbol and allegory. By this de Man implies that the battle between allegory and symbol is related to the turn to

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history identified in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study, something that de Man describes as ‘the history of an error’, that is the error of believing in symbolic plenitude. Thus the analysis of irony starts with the structure of the trope precisely because it relates to something to do with the self.105 Reading Baudelaire, de Man comes to an understanding of language, through irony, that parallels, but secularises Benjamin’s two versions of language as ‘being’ and as an instrumental tool in a fallen world. Irony involves the duplication of the self, as some comic and ridiculous situations make clear, that is those comic situations which do not involve intersubjectivity, or ‘the superiority of one subject over another, with all the implications of will to power, of violence, and possession which come to play when a person is laughing at someone else’,106 but rather a relation to something other than another self. ‘Dédoublement’ in Baudelaire’s thinking, for example, is ‘an activity of consciousness by which a man differentiates himself from a non-human world’ and this occurs in language. Baudelaire distinguishes between language as material and language as tool. From this point of view it is possible to view language as something that ‘divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-definition’.107 The ‘Fall’ can be considered not only a theological ‘Fall’, but a literal fall (as when one trips and falls) where the self is confronted with, not its superiority over nature, but its utter facticity and powerlessness, its utter instrumental relation to nature. This knowledge is something that is only gleaned after having fallen, and it does not lead to self assurance because one always knows it can happen again. De Man says, [t]he ironic two-fold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification. The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity.108

This knowledge starts a process of the unravelling of the self, which leads to either madness, or to a stilted mechanical existence which gives the lie to the happy coexistence of life and art.

III. The essays collected in Aesthetic Ideology contribute to still current critical debates and they read the rhetorical patterns and problems embedded in the work of the major European philosophers since the eighteenth century, especially Kant and Hegel, but also Locke, Schiller and Kierkegaard. In these essays de Man is concerned with showing from the inside of European philosophy how text models such as transcendental teleologies or structuralist codes, which are uncritical hypotheses, fail in their attempt to master the rhetorical and performative structure of texts. These attempts at subjugation amount to the suppression of the (negative) epistemological function



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of rhetoric and invite the re-entry of totalising tropological patterns which ignore ‘the disfiguring power of figuration’.109 Thus in ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, de Man wryly suggests that efforts to circumscribe discourses and departments within institutional boundaries are reactions to the perennial problem of dissemination that rhetoric presents.110 The modern failure to engage the problem of rhetoric (especially in the field of semiotics) can be traced back to the dismemberment of the classical theory of rhetoric that emerges in eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophy. What was to become merely a theory of figures of speech and relegated to the decorative stylistics of aesthetic taste, included, for Aristotle, the complex integration of a theory of style (elocutio) and a theory of composition (compositio), both of which rested on a theory of argumentational proof (inventio) which was the important and pivotal link to demonstrative logic. The use of rhetoric as a forensic weapon, and the potential undisciplined abuse of its persuasive power demanded this connection with philosophical truth. The danger of rhetoric that Plato was so quick to recognise, was its ability to persuade through emotional appeal: Aristotle’s Poetics is set up to militate against this potential threat through a theory of tragedy which purges the feelings of fear and pity, thus freeing the mind for the reception of logical argument. And by linking persuasion to ‘the probable’ rather than to ‘the necessary’, oratory could include doxa within the realm of episteme. Use and abuse of rhetoric thus becomes defined in the agonistic dialectic between reason and violence. Paul Ricoeur notes that It is the deep-seated conflict between reason and violence that the history of rhetoric has plunged into oblivion; emptied of its dynamism and drama, rhetoric is given over to playing with distinctions and classifications. The genius for taxonomy occupies the space deserted by the philosophy of rhetoric.111

Ricoeur reads the reification of rhetoric as a ‘lexification’ which dispensed with the problems of meaning that occurred at the level of the sentence, a move that was reproduced in modern semantic theory and semiotics. The modern term semiotics is in fact derived from semeiotikos, a Greek word meaning ‘an observant of signs’ or ‘one who interprets or divines their meaning’. Cicero and Quintillian used ta semeion, the Greek word for sign, interchangeably with tekmerion, meaning evidence, proof or symptom of what was at least temporarily absent or hidden from view. This concept of the semiotic as a theory of evidential signs, which has as its underpinning paradigm the medical symptom as evidence of a disease as its cause, was based on the natural sign and so was substitutive as opposed to diacritical. Augustine’s isolation of the word as sign (which was also substitutive) became with John Locke a theory of language as the primary means of communication with the word as the fundamental semantic unit. De Man notes in this essay that, [u]nlike such later instances as Warburton, Vico, or, of course, Herder, Locke’s theory of language is remarkably free of what is now referred to as ‘cratalytic’ delusions The arbitrariness of the sign as signifier is clearly established by him, and his notion of language is frankly semantic rather than semiotic, a theory of

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signification as a substitution of words for ‘ideas’ (in a specific and pragmatic sense of the term) and not of the linguistic sign as an autonomous structure.112

For de Man, Locke’s schematisation of the semantic development of ideas – which moves from tautological repetition to the gradual invasion of aperceptual motion that is by and large uncontrollable, to the downright abuse of language capable of dismembering the ‘texture of reality’ and reassembling it ‘in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman, or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes’113 – is a trajectory characteristic of a Greek tragedian, rather than an enlightenment philosopher committed to rational order. The attempt to anchor meaning in a theory of simple ideas, substances and mixed modes continually runs aground in figuration. Simple ideas, which should produce no semantic difficulties since both nominal and real essences coincide, defy definition in tautology. Locke’s own attempt to circumvent this inevitability leads him to repeat the tautology. Motion and light, his key examples of simple ideas, are caught in a circle of definitional repetition: ‘Motion’ should not be defined as passage because passage means motion, which is a translation; but, as de Man points out, translation also means motion, which in the German ‘ubersetzen’ translates the Greek ‘meta phorein’ meaning, of course, metaphor. A simple idea is always already a metaphor: Metaphor gives itself the totality which it then claims to define, but it is in fact the tautology of its own position. The discourse of simple ideas is figural discourse or translation and, as such, creates the fallacious illusion of definition.114

The more complex notion of substance requires a binary perspective and consequently poses two possible threats to semantic control: as a collection of properties, substances are subject to the wandering motion of similarity; as the ground of properties they are subject to possible coercion in the establishment of the necessary but mutable and uncertain link between inside and outside. These two inevitabilities operate in conjunction and ultimately determine our reality. The example of the changeling is a dramatic case in point: ‘[a]s we move from the mere contiguity between words and things in the case of simple ideas’, says de Man, ‘to the metaphorical correspondence of properties and essences in substances, the ethical tension has considerably increased’.115 And it is here that the story of tropological innocence ends and the positional power of figure begins its violent imprinting. Locke condemns mixed modes such as the trope catachresis because of their power to defy nature and signify entities which they have themselves produced. On de Man’s reading, Locke ‘has deployed the entire fan-shape or (to remain within light imagery) the entire spectrum or rainbow of tropological totalisation, the anamorphosis of tropes which has to run its full course whenever one engages, however reluctantly or tentatively, the question of language as figure’.116 Moving from Locke to Condillac reads, for de Man, like the movement from Greek tragedy to the Gothic novel, the substitution of third person narrative with the autobiographical discourse of the subject: in other words, the passage from classical semantics to romantic/modern semiotics which could allow a ‘mechanical statue’ to ‘smell roses’. Like Benjamin’s Jugenstil, the natural image is now engineered into a figuration with the



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mechanistic and the technological. Here, rather than having ‘substance abuse’ produced by the improper combination of ideas, Condillac prefers to speak of conceptual abstractions. These abstractions are threatening because not only are they necessary, but they are also seductive, fecund, corruptive and inspire a ‘dependency’ which destroys the power of rational discourse. In other words, in the development of the Lockean tradition, Condillac represents an insight into the fundamental necessity of the threat that was never lost on the Greeks. This knot in the plot, nevertheless, must be overcome, and just how it is overcome is what constitutes Condillac’s uniqueness. By juxtaposing the reality of things in the world with a true reality of personal and subjective spirit [‘as one moves from the personal subject “nous” ’ says de Man, ‘to the grammatical subject of all sentences (“notre esprit”), it becomes clear that this action of the mind is also the action of the subject’117], Condillac produces an inside/outside metaphor that understands by appropriating, seizing upon, and locking up impressions. Though the difference between literature and philosophy in this reading is becoming more and more delusive, every good story ties up the loose ends. Condillac has accounted for the need for conceptual grasp, but not for the darting violence of the passage from inside to outside. The reason for this can, in de Man’s thinking, be stated thus: entities are the objects of unstable perceptual fluctuations, the mind the place of aperceptual modifications. These modifications are incessantly in motion, but the mind depends upon them for reflection. Inability to be meets inability to be in a shared negativity, a similarity that the mind must identify, give identity (seize, lock up), in an act of recognition which will contradict the similarity and hence allow for reflection in the articulation of difference. De Man closes the narrative with the conclusion/moral that since neither entities nor the mind have substance other than that which might emerge in the juxtaposition of othernesses, being and identity are based only on verbal resemblance: And since to be verbal, in this context, means to allow substitutions based on illusory resemblances (the determining illusion being that of shared negativity) then mind, or subject, is the central metaphor, the metaphor of metaphors. The power of tropes, which Locke sensed in a diffuse way, is here condensed in the key metaphor of the subject as mind. What was a general and implicit theory of tropes in Locke becomes in Condillac a more specific theory of metaphor. Locke’s third person narrative about things in the world becomes here the autobiographical discourse of the subject.118

The closing scene, the final attempt in the Lockean tradition to thoroughly domesticate tropes, is enacted by Kant in The Critique of Judgement, the text that has served as magnetic north to twentieth-century aesthetics and criticism. Section 59 of the Critique of Judgement deals specifically with hypotyposis, the trope of presentation. For Kant, the schematic and the symbolic are understood in the intuitive mode of representation and so iconicity is said to participate automatically in both: All hypotyposis (presentation, subjectio sub adspectum) as a rendering in terms of sense is twofold. Either it is schematic, as where the intuition corresponding

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to the concept comprehended by the understanding is given a priori, or else it is symbolic, where the concept is one which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate.119

With schematic hypotyposis there is direct presentation, in other words, ‘schemata effect this presentation directly’; with symbolic presentation ‘symbols effect presentation by analogy’, and so presentation is indirect. The movement from symbolic to schematic hypotyposis is achieved by understanding corresponding relationships, the formal principle of the analogon, as when an organic body symbolises a tyrannical state. But, as de Man points out, the security of this system falters when Kant attempts to illustrate the inferiority of symbolic presentation in the realm of language: language is riddled with metaphors, epistemologically unreliable because they are ‘a mere translation [Ubertragung] from a reflection upon a represented object into an entirely different concept, to which perhaps no representation could ever correspond …’.120 Kant’s attempt to claim iconicity for both schematic and symbolic presentation is here threatened with defeat since the leap upward required of language cannot be a priori certain to take place. In other words, establishing an either/or structure within the ‘all’ of hypotyposis will not necessarily hold in the realm of language. And if it cannot hold in language then it cannot be demonstrated that the schematic hypotyposis exists as anything other than a device of memory. De Man’s reading of Condillac has indicated that rhetoric is not simply a persuasive overlay; rather, it is the very ground of cognition and as such it must determine our understanding of hypotyposis: Hypotyposis makes present to the senses something which is not within their reach, not just because it does not happen to be there but because it consists, in whole or in part, of elements too abstract for sensory representation.121

The function of hypotyposis is therefore to allow for the concept to arise ‘through abstraction’, but equally it is that aspect of representation which gives rise to the phenomenological/psychological, and hence the cultural/ideological. As one might imagine, the political stakes here are very high, and Kant obviously understands this as he cautions against an anthropomorphism which would take the schematic for the merely symbolic, or against a Deism which would entirely abandon intuition. In Section 29 of the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ Kant specifically argues against the conflation of the cultural and the epistemological: … the fact that culture is requisite for the judgement on the sublime in nature (more than for that upon the beautiful) does not involve its being an original product of culture and something being an original product of culture and something being introduced in a more or less conventional way into society. Rather it is in human nature that its foundations are laid, and, in fact, in that which, at once with common understanding, we may expect everyone to possess and may require of him, namely a native capacity for the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e. for moral feeling.122

De Man, on the other hand, reads Kant’s attempt to distinguish the symbolic from the schematic by avoiding the problematics of language as a reification which would take



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for schematic what is really symbolic/linguistic and hence an unreliable hypotyposis, and as an aestheticism taking symbolic hypotyposis as a stable ingredient of language. Paul Guyer has argued that this logical/linguistic reading of the Kantian project confuses methodological uniformity with a statement of definition. In his article called ‘Kant’s Distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime’, he points out that by analysing the sublime, like the beautiful, according to quantity, quality, relation and modality, Kant’s interest is in procedural uniformity rather than aimed at definition. Taking what was intended as methodological as definitional has had the effect of producing interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Judgement which reduce his analysis of aesthetic judgement to either a principle for pure phenomenology or a guideline for a purely logical or linguistic analysis. According to Guyer, this is to reify the complexity of Kant’s theory, which for him is a compact statement of a theory of aesthetic judgement according to which the significance of particular forms of aesthetic judgements as well as the difference between them may be understood by showing how a variety of related but distinct psychological processes which explain their occurrence satisfy a single but abstract set of requirements of logical and epistemological status in a variety of specifically distinct ways. Once Kant’s four moments are understood to describe a complex set of relations among feelings of aesthetic response, explanations of such responses, and the status of the judgements which give expression to these responses, it can be seen how they can both characterise a single form of judgement and yet allow for meaningful distinctions among specific aesthetic predicates.123

For Guyer, although phenomenology, psychology, epistemology and linguistic analyses play an important part in Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, the complexity of the distinction gets lost if reduced to any one of these realms. Our ability to retrieve and understand the past rests fundamentally on the theoretical link between particular subjective states and a generally stable phenomenal world reflecting events. In Kant’s Third Critique the beautiful functions to guarantee that the other ‘thing’ is indeed out there, while the purpose of the sublime is to provide the grounds for an intellectual overview which is universally true. It depends first on an articulated difference between transcendental and metaphysical principles, and secondly, on a means of juxtaposing the two in some form of identification. As Norris puts it, ‘it is evident throughout Kant’s writings that the aesthetic cannot simply be cordoned off within a separate discussion of art and its objects’.124 But if the Third Critique has managed to stand, in many camps, as the most sophisticated attempt to articulate such a linkage, it has also been, in the past three decades, subject to its most scathing critique. De Man’s reading of the text, for example, eschews any dyadic oversimplification of the Kantian project, taking on board as he does the absolute necessity of questioning ‘from the inside of the Kantian text’ how ‘the substance or the structure of a transcendental discourse can be determined’.125 [my italics]. If ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’ might seem to suggest that figuration, the attempts to purge, isolate or divert the performativity of tropes first becomes a problem with enlightenment thinkers, in ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion’ de Man

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deals with an earlier attempt by philosophy to manage tropes, that is, Pascal’s theorisation of the link between language and geometry. He begins with a discourse on allegory, and its resistance to definition because it is sequential and takes the form of a temporal unfolding, yet the content does not mimetically follow its shape which calls into question its referential status. In addition, its goal is transparency in representation but this ‘does not stand in the service of something that can be represented’.126 Following Benjamin and Alois Riegl, de Man asserts the important connection between the allegorical and the marginal, and adds to this an epistemological import, that is, its role as interlocutor between ‘an epistemological order of truth and deceit’ and ‘a narrative or compositional order of persuasion’: Allegory is frequently dismissed as wooden, barren (kahl), ineffective, or ugly, yet the reasons for its ineffectiveness, far from being a shortcoming, are of such all-encompassing magnitude that they coincide with the furthest-reaching achievements available to the mind and reveal boundaries that aesthetically more successful works of art, because of this very success, were unable to perceive.127

Hence it is that de Man will ask about allegory ‘[w]hy is it that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided referentially indirect mode?’128 He turns to Pascal as an exemplification of the attempt to articulate epistemology with persuasion. In this essay de Man notes that a certain break in Pascal’s argument occurs when he attempts to make a clear delineation between arguments that proceed according to a geometrical method and hence lead to productive and reliable proofs and arguments which use ‘the language of pleasure and seduction’; that is, arguments that operate on an aesthetic level rather than on a rational level. Pascal wants to keep these two domains clearly separated, but concedes that although they can happily operate in conjunction, ‘when natural truth and human desire fail to coincide’, conflict arises, obviously to the peril of rational truth. The break in the argument occurs for de Man when Pascal engages in ‘a private obfuscation’, or begins to reflect on the work of his friend Chevalier de Mare, who is engaged in attempting to theorise the rules for persuasion as pleasure, which Pascal acknowledges may be possible, though he denies that it is within his capability to engage such a project. This denial is important because, despite Pascal’s interest in the method of geometry, he is in practice very adept at the rhetoric of seduction. This raises the question as to whether this moment in the argument is simply personal irony or downright evasiveness. De Man opts for the latter possibility because, in his reading, the Reflexions never recover from this break. He asks the question ‘[w]hat is it in this argument that accounts for the occurrence of this disruption? What is it, in a rigorous epistemology, that makes it impossible to decide whether its exposition is a proof or an allegory?’129 In the exposition that follows, de Man goes on to show how the clear distinction that Pascal attempts to make between real and nominal definitions, which is so necessary for a philosophy that would remain rational and reliable, begins to break down in the very attempt to articulate it. De Man traces the rhetorical shifts that take place: ‘[t]he text glides almost imperceptibly from a discussion of nominal definition to that of what he calls “primitive



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words” ’,130 a shift which is then repeated in the logic of the argument. For while ‘nominal definitions’ are conventional and not open to contradiction because they are ‘clearly designated in perfectly known terms’, and ‘primitive words’ contain a natural language element which shines through and thus makes definition infinitely regressive and tautological, the two are said to be ‘coextensive and blend into each other’, which masks the fact that they are fundamentally different: one is subject to definition, and must be conventionally policed, the other is not, and so is universal. Pascal is aware of the difference and continues to compensate for the incommensurability by focusing on the problem of universality itself: ‘It is not the nature of these things which I declare to be known by all, but simply the relationship between the name and the thing, so that on hearing the expression time, all turn (or direct) the mind toward the same entity …’131 In other words, Pascal splits the concept of the universal through the function of the word as vector. The word itself functions to turn all men toward the universal, though the entity itself is understood differently by each of them. Hence, the primitive word is both conventional (like nominal definitions) because ‘all turn’, but it is also universal because all point to the same entity. This split in the concept of the universal allows for the easy linkage between nominal definitions and primitive words. For de Man, what this manoeuvre masks is that the primitive word, as sign, has now become a trope, ‘a substitutive relationship that has to posit a meaning whose existence cannot be verified, but that confers upon the sign an unavoidable signifying function’.132 This means that the ground of the geometrical system is first performative; a positing that is unverifiable except insofar as it is a turn. Primitive words become meaningful as turns, so the system itself remains ungrounded: it cannot control either its existence or its direction, which means that Pascal’s nominal definition of primitive terms uncovers the propositional structure of those terms (‘which have to, but cannot be proven’), and hence the nominal definition becomes a real definition. This strategy of splitting the concept is used again when Pascal attempts to integrate this (non) definition into a cosmology based on the principle of double infinity (the infinitely large and infinitely small). When the problem of language and its relationship to cognition again presents itself, again via the re-emergence of de Mere – who argued that it is possible to conceive of infinite space as made up of indivisible number, or numbers without extension – Pascal makes a distinction between the laws of number and the laws of space: the number one is paradoxical; it is a nominal definition of non-number, and at the same time generically homogeneous with number because it can be added to number infinitely. Hence number becomes a synecdochal structure which can totalise infinitude, but, it turns out, only because the ambivalence of the nominal/real definitions, which emerged as a result in the split in the concept of the universal that was necessary to link nominal definitions and primitive words, becomes part of the logic of the argument: The synecdochal totalisation of infinitude is possible because the unit of number, the one, functions as a nominal definition. But for the argument to be valid the nominally indivisible number must be distinguished from the really indivisible space, a demonstration that Pascal can accomplish easily, but only because the

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key words of the demonstration – indivisible, spatial extension (entendue), species (genre), and definition – function as real, and not nominal definitions … 133

What allows for the truth of the totality (synecdoche) is nominal definition; but what makes the form valid is real definition. In order for the identity and difference in this system to be maintained, another principle must be found that lies completely outside of it, a completely heterogeneous principle which will keep the real from folding in upon the nominal; that is a principle which will keep the real from becoming tautological. This heterogeneous entity is the zero. To explain what is at issue here it might be useful to refer to the syllogism: All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

In this instance ‘All men are mortal’ functions as a nominal definition, a synecdochal totalisation which is not open to contradiction. Yet, in order for the syllogism to be valid, ‘Socrates is a man’ requires the precise circumscription of a proposition, and hence depends on a real definition: the criteria for ‘man’ must be controlled and policed such that ‘man’ does not exceed the exact criteria for the species, which includes mortality among other things. But in order for this careful circumscription to take place, thus ensuring that the nominal definition will remain true, there must exist outside of the system something that is absolutely heterogeneous (the earth, the sky, the divinities). With the introduction of the zero, the separation between number and space, which is potentially threatening, is also healed. For equivalences can easily be found in the order of time and of motion for the zero function in number: instant and stasis (repos) are the equivalences that, thanks to the zero, allow one to re-establish the ‘necessary and reciprocal link’ between the four intrawordly dimensions on which divine order depends.134

The term ‘order’ here is important, because without the zero function the hierarchical structure of the divine, indeed, ‘man’s’ own fallen status comes into question. The point of de Man’s argument is that this ‘system of double infinities’ depends on the zero function for its grounding, but must also efface this function in order to cover up the rupture. More importantly, the rupture occurs at the level of language, ‘in the inability of a theory of language as sign or as name (nominal definition) to ground this homogeneity without having recourse to the signifying function, the real definition, that makes the zero of signification the necessary condition for grounded knowledge’.135 What this means then is that the theory of language as constative, and hence cognitive, the theory of signs as names is dependent upon another function of language, the performative, which transforms the absolutely heterogeneous zero, into a linguistic ‘almost zero’, the name, which engenders the ‘principle of infinity, of genus, species and homogeneity, which allow for synecdochal totalisations …’136 In Pascal, the way that the covering of the zero function by the performance of language is managed is through the ambivalent use of the two words zero and neant.



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De Man goes on in this essay to show how this concealing of the absolutely heterogeneous in a geometrical system that aspires to the transcendental through the erasure of its linguistic base, is manifest in the more conventionally ‘literary’ Pensées, which have the subject ‘man’ as their theme. He first shows how the dialectical model based on binary oppositions, which is the underlying structural pattern of the Pensées, is totalised in a series of chiasmic reversals which both undo the oppositions and at the same time hold them within a totalised system of cognition. In the first instance, nature as a first principle and a constant, is crossed with custom, a second principle and erasable as in ‘[f]athers fear that the natural love of their children can be erased’.137 In the section on the nature of man this undoing of the nature/culture polarity becomes incorporated into a grid which first establishes the ‘cognitive value of doubt’ by reversing the first principle of wakefulness and perception with a second principle of awaking and dreaming in ‘is it not possible that this half of our life (day) is itself a mere dream on which other dreams are grafted, and of which we will awake at death?’138 The pairing of scepticism with truth and knowledge is opposed to dogmatism which is natural because ‘infinite doubt is intolerable’. The truth of the uncertainty of both nature and origin, established in the first two chiasmic reversals, here confronts the impasse of a natural dogmatism which lays claim to both of these: in terms of the text this impasse is marked by a shift from ‘is’ (propositional logic) to ‘ought’ (modal logic). The way out of the impasse is to name the predicament ‘man’, an entity which is ‘one and not one’ at the same time, ‘a metaphor of number’, both a nominal and a real definition, finite and infinite at the same time. Hence a system which begins by destabilising the clear distinction between nature and culture, and proceeds to establish self-knowledge as uncertainty, becomes anthropological knowledge by naming the undecidable suspension between certainty and uncertainty ‘man’, and then mapping this knowledge onto the metaphor of number to produce teleological knowledge. The extent to which all of this is kept within the Christian context is indicated by another Pensée on the nature of man which is again controlled by the trope of chiasmus. Misery is paired with (self) knowledge, and greatness is paired with being, which gets reversed such that misery becomes paired with being and greatness with (self-) knowledge (of misery). The mediation is carried out by the apparently deductive propositions in the sentence: ‘il est donc miserable puisqu’il l’est’, where the cognitive power is carried by the logical articulation donc and puisque, and the ontological power by the tautology of the assertion. 139

The sphere of the political is also accounted for by another chiasmus where the natural language of the people (which is doxa and false) is paired with the meta-language of the geometrician (which is episteme and true) and then reversed such that popular opinion is said to carry some true knowledge, whereas the geometrician’s scorn for popular opinion is false. This disjunction is then totalised by a final proposition which states that … it remains true that the people are in error, although their opinions are sound, because they don’t locate their truth where it belongs, and by locating it where it is not, their opinions are again very erroneous and very unsound.140

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The interest here, however, is in the disruption of the clear symmetry and totalisation of the chiasmic reversals in this system: and it just so happens that this occurs where it really counts. De Man identifies one Pensée (Justice, power) where the reversibility of the dialectical structure does not occur, but goes in one direction. Here the just and justice are set in opposition to necessity and force ‘where it is just that what is just should be followed’ something that ‘depends on propositional logic’ (cognition) and so carries the criteria of truth and falsehood, and ‘it is necessary that what has the most power should be followed’ depends upon ‘sheer quantitative power’ (performance), coercive (force) is duplicated in justice (rational argument and judicial praxis), and in order for this duplicity to be controlled, justice must become powerful and power just.141 But this cannot happen because justice is subject to dispute whereas power is indisputable because necessary: modal logic as performance usurps propositional logic as the measure of epistemological rigour. But de Man goes on: ‘the unilateral victory of force over justice, if it is to be enunciated … still can only be stated in the mode of cognition and of deduction, as is evident from the use of the mode of cognition and of deduction, and is evident from the use of the deductive ‘ainsi’ coupled with ‘faire’ in the sentence ‘ainsi on a fait …’142 This last sentence is, for de Man, the moment of assimilation of the absolutely heterogeneous, and a re-inscription of the zero factor into a system of cognition, which reveals the ungroundedness of the system, and makes the ‘ainsi’ ironical because the pretence of deduction is in fact a disruptive imposition. Reflecting back upon the theoretical text of the Réflexions, what de Man can say is that which the more ‘literary’ text of the Pensées tells us is that ‘the break [that] in the Réflexions was due to the complications of definition is now seen to be a function of the heterogeneity between cognitive and performative language. Language in Pascal now separates in two distinct directions: a cognitive function that is right (juste) but powerless, and a modal function that is mighty (forte) in its claim to rightness.’ The impossibility of incorporating cognitive justice and the power of seduction into a homogeneous geometrical system is a kind of ‘(ironic) pseudo-knowledge’ of the pretence ‘to order sequentially, in a narrative, what is actually the destruction of all sequence’.143 This, says de Man, is allegory – not something that avails itself of definition, precisely because it is performance. As Gasché has argued, the method which de Man employs in arriving at his conclusions often involves setting up analogies between parts of a text or body of work, meanwhile ignoring differences, in order to allow for the comparison of aspects which are otherwise wholly incommensurable.144 In his late essay ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, for example, de Man begins by quoting Kant’s discrimination between metaphysical and transcendental principles. The passage is quite straightforwardly symmetrical and in fact, as de Man notes, parallels the symmetry of Kant’s entire architectonic. The ontological status of the transcendental principle, the ‘is’ that allows for the representation of objects of cognition, has a deep structure, a predication, which is itself ontological: in other words, the transcendental principle carries the principle of its being within itself. The deep structure of the metaphysical principle, on the other hand, must be the empirical concept of the body as a movable



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thing in space. With this type of predication, the condition of existence becomes the determining ground of causality. The concept of the body as a movable thing in space includes both an ontological and an empirical predication and since ontological predication is that which allows for the representation of objects of cognition in the first place, de Man can say that [t]he condition of existence of bodies is called substance; to state that substance is the cause of the motion of bodies (as Kant does in the passage quoted) is to examine critically the possibility of their existence.145

Thus, via the concept of bodies in motion, the link between transcendental and metaphysical principles is made: the metaphysical principle contains knowledge of the world which is pre-critical and so requires the silent intervention of a transcendental principle containing no knowledge of the world, but which nevertheless retains its critical thrust because it knows about origins and limits. ‘Transcendental philosophy’ says de Man, ‘is always the critical philosophy of metaphysics’.146 Ideologies, also directed to an outside world, participate in the predicament of metaphysics in that their predications are determined a priori by an inaccessible transcendental realm. The structure of this system can be called an asymptote and the disturbance of either the outward extension or the curvature of the boundary threatens either idealism or error: ‘philosophies that succumb to ideology lose their epistemological sense, whereas philosophies that try to by-pass or repress ideology lose all critical thrust and risk being repressed by what they foreclose.’147 For de Man, the iconic element that not only underlies the linkage of this system, but motivates the entire Critique of Judgement, is the image of bodies in motion. The importance of this notion of bodies in motion, which de Man arrives at through the circuitous logic just outlined, cannot be underestimated, because not only will it be the basis of his entire reading, but it also affords him the opportunity to adjust his interpretation of the rest of the passage quoted above. Focusing on the word (as opposed to larger syntactical units) as the basis of the sign system – a predilection derived from classical semiotics and continued with both Peirce and Saussure – allowed Locke to relegate the use of tropes in philosophical discourse to the realm of abuse; tropes were considered a feminisation of language which was decorative and pleasing when kept in their proper place, but completely inappropriate in the serious business of philosophical inquiry. Following Locke, what the eighteenth-century rhetoricians attempted to do was to strictly delimit the performativity of rhetoric by keeping it contained in the realm of aesthetics in a way that would keep poetry and prose, literature and philosophy, distinctive categories and open the field to unhindered scientific intelligence. The theoretical removal of rhetoric from its participation in the circumscription of a logical sphere meant that it could be considered strictly as an aesthetic phenomenon. Hence, at bottom, the importance of removing tropes from the understanding of linguistic performance founded on the semiotics of the word was in grounding interpretation in rational representation which could move from the atoms of particular experience to a general theory of universal human reality. The consequences of this would be an emancipatory politics founded on ethical truth.

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Analytical philosophy’s turn to speech act theory became the most sophisticated attempt to isolate linguistic performance, at the expense of literary language. De Man’s criticism of this tradition, then, begins with the recognition of the cognitive function of rhetoric, which continues to be dismissed in the institutional activity that strives to keep philosophy and literature autonomous disciplines. What is precisely at issue for de Man is the relationship between rational discourse and rhetoric, between discourses that proceed from the paradigmatic and substitutive axis of signification, and those controlled by the collocation of syntactic units. In this it is neither simply words, nor is it larger units of meaning that are a priori taken for granted as objects of interpretation. But as he argues in this essay, it is never possible to simply decide to operate outside of ideology. Andrzej Warminski makes the point succinctly: … even a ‘critical’ (transcendental or otherwise) thought cannot step ‘out’ of ideology – or ‘by-pass or repress ideology’ without losing its critical thrust and risk being repossessed by what it forecloses because it is part of the same system as the ideology it would critique.148

This system that de Man says includes both ideology and the critique of ideology is the system of tropological transformations. In ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ de Man argues for an alternative reading of intellectual history where the aesthetic is not marginalised or trivialised, used as a ‘principle of exclusion’, as it seems to be in modern times, but as a necessary articulation. He reads in Kant, for example, that the link between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, between theory and practice, has to occur by means of the aesthetic, however problematical that linkage becomes: Aesthetic theory is critical philosophy to the second degree, the critique of critiques. It critically examines the possibility and the modalities of political discourse and political action, the inescapable burden of any linkage between discourse and action. The treatment of the aesthetic in Kant is certainly far from conclusive, but one thing is clear: it is epistemological as well as political through and through.149

Kant, along with Hegel, Marx and modern ‘aesthetic thinkers’ such as Benjamin, Lukács, Althusser and Adorno, approach the aesthetic as something that functions in the articulation between the orders of the political and the philosophical. Turning to Hegel’s Aesthetics, de Man focuses on language, the problematics of which were flagged up by Adorno and Szondi, in order to read two important dimensions of Hegel’s thinking: the linkage between the theory of language, the subject and sensory perception; and the relationship between art and literature (or the ‘phenomenal manifestation of the idea’150) and history. He looks for the moment that the idea appears and why its mode of appearance, which is pastness, is necessary. Again, because a modern reductive brand of historiography confusedly derives the modern from the classical rather than tradition, and conflates sign and symbol in language, and these mistakes occur in particular in the reading of the Aesthetics, de Man elects



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to look outside that text in order to address the question of why the appearance of the idea necessarily belongs to the past. In the Encyclopedia and in the Logic the appearance of the idea occurs when consciousness of the world has been interiorised through perception and imagination and is now only available through memory. Only through this process of memorisation does the idea begin to leave a trace which is also available to the senses. Memorisation, and its product the trace, are inextricably bound together, constituting, by way of notation, ‘the surface of the world’. At this moment the distinction between [t]he inside-outside metaphor of experience and signification can be forgotten, which is the necessary (if not sufficient) condition for thought (Denken) to begin. The aesthetic moment in Hegel occurs as the conscious forgetting of a consciousness by means of a materially actualised system of notation or inscription.151

Returning to the section on the ‘symbolics of the sublime’ in the Aesthetics, de Man determines to find this theory of memorisation at the heart of Hegel’s aesthetics. But what he reads in Hegel are two versions of the sublime, one that is aligned with the symbolism of language, but more importantly (and this version is what de Man fixes on) another which dissociates the sublime from the plastic arts and aligns it with language, specifically with the iconoclasm of Hebraic poetry. On this reading the sublime equates with the written word, countering the representational or imaginative character – in short the monumentalisation – of the plastic arts. De Man makes a distinction here between a post-Longinian sublime that feeds into the romantic high argument and this alternative sublime discernible in Hegel. Here he finds two patterns of narration, one dialectical, which preserves the analogy between the poetic and divine creation and effectively anthropomorphises language, and a second pattern in which creation is in the positing power of the word in which the world is merely the ‘transitive object of the utterance’. This different creation contrasts with and contradicts the notion of largesse of soul produced in the anthropomorphising process: If we say that language speaks, that the grammatical subject of a proposition is language rather than a self, we are not fallaciously anthropomorphising language but rigorously grammatising the self. The self is deprived of any locutionary power; to all intents and purposes it may as well be mute.152

The grammatisation of the self, however, does not mean that the language does not speak and write. It does: scripture quotes Moses who quotes God. De Man’s reading of these two versions of the sublime in Hegel, is based on two different rhetorical modes. The first version, which he describes as the ‘convergence of discourse and the sacred’, is based on the rhetorical mode of representation, and is conveyed through mimesis, in this case the reproduction of the temporality of an action (and God said ‘Let there be light’), and diegesis, or relating of the story of a past event (as in ‘And God called the light day …’).153 In this version, then – which Hegel pretends is the sublime from the point of view of God – through the process of showing and telling, is said to occur ‘by way of phenomenal cognition’. The second

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version, on the other hand, which might be considered the sublime from the point of view of the human, occurs in the rhetorical mode of trope, that is of direct apostrophe, and is very different from the representational sublime. De Man selects a quotation from Psalms: ‘Light is your garment, that you wear; you stretch out the heavens like a curtain …’.154 Although this statement is an apostrophe, it functions as an inside/ outside metaphor: that is the garment is an outside that conceals an inside. For de Man this metaphor is read as being either meaningless or duplicitous. The garment is part of the sensory world and is thus insignificant as compared to the logos, incapable of positing; however, it is also spirit or light and thus powerful in the knowledge of its weakness. De Man points out the confusion: One can pretend to be weak when one is strong, but the power to pretend is decisive proof of one’s strength. One can know oneself, as man does, as that which is unable to know, but by moving from knowledge to position all is changed. Position is all of a piece, and, moreover, unlike thought it actually occurs.155

The two versions of the sublime, one based on representation and one on trope are entirely incompatible, reinforcing the difference between the sacred and the human, the absolute otherness of the divine, and the impossibility of overcoming this difference by way of dialectic. ‘Yet’, says de Man, the two discourses remain intertwined as by a knot that cannot be unravelled. The heterogeneity of art and of the sacred, first introduced as a moment in an epistemological dialectic, is rooted in the linguistic structure in which the dialectic is itself inscribed.’156

Hegel then passes from aesthetic theory to ethics and politics: the autonomous individual has a positive relationship with God, and is endowed with ethical selfdetermination, for which he will be rewarded or punished through the legal system. De Man gives the reason for this shift: [t]he political in Hegel originates in the critical undoing of belief, the end of the current theodicy, the banishment of the defenders of faith from the affairs of the state, and the transformation of theology into the critical philosophy of right.157

Of course the vehicle of this shift is language, that is, on de Man’s reading, Hegel replaces language understood as symbol and language understood as sign and trope with one that is more like a linked chain of ‘semiotic and tropological features’, a move that functions, not to undermine the dual structure of signification assumed by the symbol, but to undo the essential agreement or correspondence between genres of tropes and the symbol. Hegel in fact reinforces the dual outside/inside structure of signification in the symbol, emphasising that although the relationship between sign and meaning is dialectical it requires the mediation of understanding to enter the divine otherness of the outside. The symbol, as a bipolar structure whose principle of signification is the tension between interiority and exteriority, keeps the outside concealed within itself. Genres of tropes, on the other hand, do not keep exteriority concealed within; hence they must posit it, which changes the principle of signification



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from activity between poles to mere movement of position. The consequences of this changed theory of language are, first, to eliminate the sign-producing function, and secondly, to eliminate trope by restricting signification to meaningless reiteration. Now the difference between the sublime and comparative art forms is that with the sublime, exteriority is concealed within, and aufhebung is self-annihilating, whereas art, governed by wit rather than genius, posits arbitrarily, pretending to discover the ‘new’ in what has really been pre-established. This shift in the understanding of language then, on de Man’s reading, becomes the ground for the grammatisation of the self: the thinking subject emerges as a result of a chain of tropological changes – apostrophe, prosopopoeia, metalepsis – which give voice and face and presence; it is equally arbitrary and pretends to verify its legitimacy in the sequential unfolding of its future until it reaches a point of self-recognition. Like the work of art, the subject of philosophy is a reconstruction a posteriori. Poets and philosophers share this lucidity about their enterprise.158

The function of art is to give the illusion of discovery; however, this is not a conspiratorial enterprise: poets and philosophers must forget the knowledge that they learn by rote if they are to commit to their respective discourses. Art is therefore prosaic rather than sublime, but, on de Man’s reading, Hegel understands this productively in terms of the master/slave dialectic: superstructures such as genres are necessary for the oppression of infrastructures such as grammar and tropes; however, Hegel’s Aesthetics, an essentially prosaic discourse on art, is a discourse of the slave because it is a discourse of the figure rather than of genre, of trope rather than of representation. As a result, it is also politically legitimate and effective as the undoer of usurped authority.159

Warminski has pointed out the important differentiation made between what de Man reads as Kant and Hegel’s ‘radical material inscriptions’ and Schiller’s ‘ideologizing aesthetization’, a distinction which informs all of the essays collected in Aesthetic Ideology and distinguishes his approach from Habermas/Marcuse’s ideology critique and Terry Eagleton’s ‘critique of ideology’. Schiller’s misappropriation of Kant, says Warminsky, demonstrates an ‘utter lack of philosophical interest in Kant’s critical project and his empiricization, anthropologization, psychologization, indeed humanization, of the Kantian sublime’ which ‘ends up in sheer idealism, the separation of the mind from the body, and the conception of an “aesthetic state” all too cozy for the likes of some later aesthetic-politicians, for example, Joseph Goebbels’.160 In ‘Kant and Schiller’ de Man addresses the problem of Schiller’s recuperation of Kant, noting in almost Rousseauesque fashion that recuperation involves a kind of domestication and reduction which ‘seems to be always a regression from the incisiveness and from the impact, from the critical impact of the original’.161 Thus with Schiller the aesthetic is again distinguished for its synthesising qualities and raised up as the model which education and the state should imitate. Now in this essay de Man is interested in analysing the passage from what he describes as a cognitive or tropological linguistic model to a performative linguistic

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model that Kant seems to facilitate, and then the subsequent re-inscription of the performative into another tropological system, Schiller’s tropological system of aesthetics. On this reading there are two processes involved in this movement. The first is the atemporal process of passage, the passage from a cognitive, tropological model of language to a model that is performative, a passage that involves an ‘occurrence’ or an event. What motivates this passage is ‘the epistemological critique of tropes’, itself made possible because of the emergence of ‘a transcendental critical discourse’ which will push the notion of trope to the extreme, trying to saturate your whole field of language. But then certain linguistic elements will remain which the concept of trope cannot reach, and which can be, for example – though there are other possibilities – performative.162

It is precisely because occurrences are atemporal, completely separate from, not an attribute of, a progressive or regressive continuum, but the manifestation of what Hegel will describe as ‘the new’, that they are performative and historical. And since performance is power, history, for de Man, is the ‘emergence of the language of power from out of the language of cognition’.163 This is not, however, a dialectical and hence temporal model, because on de Man’s reading the cognitive and the performative exist together as a kind of doubling, together but completely separate, involved in a ‘singledirected movement that goes from one to the other’.164 De Man views this process as ‘irreversible’ because the passage does not involve a ‘return’, but rather a relapse, or a material ‘reinscription of the performative in a tropological system of cognition again’.165 Materially re-inscribing the historical occurrence within a tropological system is a process motivated by a resistance to the ‘occurrence’, or a resistance to the ‘new’. Thus the reception history of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (which for de Man was a historical occurrence, after which nothing happened) is not historical, in as much as it is a resistance to the event, an attempt to domesticate it. De Man describes this process in his reading of what happens between Kant and Schiller. He starts out with a stylistic analysis of Schiller’s ‘Of the Sublime’. If Kant’s work is an occurrence, then as part of the process of re-inscription, Schiller’s style is tropological, that is, it is on the side of cognition. Specifically, the form of re-inscription employed by Schiller is chiasmus, which is a ‘reversible’ as opposed to an ‘irreversible’ structure found in Kant. In other words, Schiller sets up polarities, or antitheses, such as for example, the polarity nature/reason, and pairs these with the attributes terror and tranquillity respectively. Nature is terrifying, while reason is tranquil. But with the introduction of the notion of the sublime, the polarities are reversed: reason takes on the attribute of terror, and nature acquires the attribute of tranquillity, which effectively contains the whole system within the limits of the four possible attributes. The temporality of Schiller’s reversible chiasmic pattern is hence ahistorical. By contrast, Kant’s sublime moves from the mathematical to the dynamic, but this is not an opposition or a polarity: in other words, there could never be a movement from the dynamic to the mathematical sublime. The movement is a passage from



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the cognitive to the performative, a passage that is not dialectical – the cognitive or tropological is different in kind from the performative – but discontinuous and it produces an occurrence. Schiller recuperates Kant by setting up a sharp opposition between the drive to know (represent, change nature) and the drive to maintain (self -preservation), the opposition between changing and staying the same. He then revises Kant’s understanding of the mathematical and the dynamic sublime by introducing the theoretical and the practical sublime: the theoretical sublime involves the polarity nature/knowledge, where nature is the passive object of the desire to know, and nature/self-preservation, where nature is the powerful force behind our destiny. Schiller’s understanding of the theoretical sublime could reasonably be mapped onto Kant’s mathematical sublime as ‘the failure of representation’; however, the practical sublime parts company with the dynamic sublime. For Schiller, danger emerges from the fact of the physical body’s weakness in relation to the power of nature. Thus the polarity that is described, a polarity that brings Kant’s thinking into a tidy cognitive model, is one that pits the representation of a magnitude in opposition with the representation of a danger, which one’s imagination and physical strength, respectively, fail to overcome. Schiller goes on to promote the importance of the practical sublime over the theoretical sublime: clearly the strongest pole in the opposition is the practical because the desire to preserve ourselves has a greater emotional power than, and will always win out against, the desire for knowledge. Equally, the terrifying object will assault our sensibilities with a violence that exposes the pre-eminence of inner freedom, by dint of the sheer distance it reveals between the power of the sensory and the supersensory in us. The problem here is that Schiller has substituted a philosophical problem having to do with the structure of the imagination, which was Kant’s concern, with a concern for psychological and empirical questions, practical questions about how the sublime works. In other words, Kant’s philosophical problem is made into a practical, pragmatic even literary enterprise of determining how to deal psychologically with terror. What Schiller suggests is that, with the practical sublime, we witness real danger, though at a safe remove from it and in this way we are made to imagine the danger from a position of tranquillity, thus maintaining our mental integrity. Schiller’s theory of the imagination, unlike Kant’s, in which imagination is the experience of limitation in the face of magnitude, is invoked in order to experience terror without actually being exposed to danger. In other words terror exists as a representation in the imagination, but one that is so real that a) self-preservation is awakened and b) the tranquillity of freedom is experienced by reason. The affect of this move is to bring the system around: We achieve self-preservation by substituting for the reality the imagined situation. So self-preservation becomes imagined instead of being really real, and therefore self-preservation now relates to representation. As a result the chiasmus is fulfilled, and knowledge will now relate to reality, which is another way of saying, as he says that our knowledge is real, it is Ernst, it is not purely imaginary, but is a real experience, genuine, some genuine terror in there, not pure play.166

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From here Schiller shifts from what is ostensibly a psychological model of the imagination to something that is more dialectical: the practical sublime consists of the opposition danger/safety, danger including death and moral freedom. Thus when danger becomes overwhelming it enters into contact with moral safety: that is, the contemplation of terror from the position of moral safety. Moral safety, however, is understood in terms of immortality (religion) which hinges on the notion of sublime innocence, the dialectical synthesis of divine justice and personal innocence. This leads to first a relationship between the divine and the human, but also a sharp distinction between the two based on a division between the intellectual and the physical and existential. The intellectual is removed from the physical in as much as the laws of reason are identified with the divine will. For Schiller this means that the personality connects with a generalising ideal security rather than an individual material security and this ideal and expansive security becomes available in the aesthetic contemplation of the sublime. This version of the pure intellect achievable through aesthetic, or the transcendence of the aesthetic differs radically from Kant’s aesthetic failure, or ‘disruption’. In Letters on Aesthetic Education, written much later, the model changes quite significantly, as he revises the relationship between the sensory and the intellectual. Here he replaces the opposition between the theoretical and the practical sublime with the opposition sensory desire and the desire for form. Sensory desire is characterised by immediacy, singularity, particularity and the individual. Desire for form aspires to generality and the absolute. These two tendencies are incompatible and must be kept separate. But, Schiller insists, though they are incompatible, these two are not antagonistic: they do not enter into a dialectical synthesis. If that were the case then the senses would have to submit to the intellect and that would lead to human division and monotony. Hierarchy, rather than dialectic, is the other alternative in this system, but this consists of a ‘reversible reciprocity’ whereby sensory desire and desire for form are mutually dependent (Hegel’s master/slave) but mutually co-ordinate. In order to get out of this impasse – the two desires cannot simply exist together – synthesis must occur somewhere and Schiller says it occurs at the level of ideas and principles. So, at the level of drives, sense and form are opposed and not dialectically synthesisable; however, at the level of principles – the principle of sense and the principle of form – they are synthesisable. And it is from this conjunction between empirical experience and form that the ideal of beauty originates. This synthesis is made in the name of humanity, and humanity is part of empirical reality, the necessities of which are not subject to critique: they are absolute and so humanity is a principle of closure. Humanity here is on the side of what Schiller earlier called self-preservation.

IV. De Man’s readings of the material inscription and disarticulation of the aesthetic in Kant and Hegel and then the misreading and ideologization in its Schillerian reception can be read as an allegorisation of the aesthetic itself. Unlike Terry Eagleton, who



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laudably professes the enlightenment view that as ‘a political force … the aesthetic still concerns us as one of the most powerful ideological drives to act upon the reality of history’ precisely because it is deeply bound up with epistemology and thus knowledge167, de Man foregrounds the relationship between allegorisation and disarticulation of the aesthetic because … it is never easy to distinguish an appeal to taste and sentiment which offers an alternative to autocracy from one which allows such power to ground itself all the more securely in the living sensibilities of its subjects. There is a world of political difference between a law which the subject really does give to itself, in radical democratic style, and a decree which still descends from on high but which the subject now ‘authenticates’.168

Eagleton’s commitment to historical materialism, indeed the history of aesthetics, makes him highly sensitive to the ambivalence of the category of the aesthetic, its indispensable function in bringing back into communication the humanised zones of bodily pleasure, reason and morality, and equally its ability to supersede this function and become a law unto itself. He claims that there is an aesthetics of the left and an aesthetics of the right, both of which have clear historical underpinnings, and yet he holds out for the potential significance of the category of the aesthetic as a critique of ideology. By contrast, de Man is not so optimistic: for him the aesthetic is in its essence ideological, indeed the ideological category par excellence. In his view, aesthetic ideology is a naive, but necessary and inescapable confusion between the sensible (or phenomenal) and the order of language. Any gesturing toward the political significance of any writer is bound up in the erroneous belief that language straightforwardly delivers to us a lifeworld. Since aesthetics originates in a belief in the felicity of human communication and the common good, it is structured by this fallacy: ‘aesthetics’ is ideology. Much of what is being claimed here can be understood in reading de Man’s ‘The Concept of Irony’. One imperative of German Idealism is to theorise the means by which the finite can be brought into contact with the infinite. In order to achieve this, subjectivity must acquire a determination which will allow it to become more directly related to action. Alexander Baumgarten thinks of determination as merely a clarification of the sensate; however, for the idealists determination is established through negation. J. G. Fichte, for example, believed in a primordial, intelligent and infinite ‘I’ capable of constituting or ‘positing’ a reality. For him, the self becomes aware of external reality by positing a non-self: this opposition makes it aware of external objects that are in some senses also a part of itself. But positing a non-self is also a negation of the self which seriously compromises the notion of the infinite self, and the ability of the self to produce a world and perform freely within it. For Fichte, the self remains unaware of its own activities, is caught up in the anxiety of struggle in the maintenance of its autonomy. Andrew Bowie describes this idealist perspective like this: Idealist philosophy relies in varying ways on a version of Spinoza’s ‘all determination is negation’: something can only become what it is by its negative relationship to everything else, which defines what it is not. In terms of the

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subject’s ability to move beyond anything specific we can know as a scientific fact, this means that within subjectivity there is a capacity which is unlimited in a much more emphatic sense than Kant would allow.169

By contrast, German Romanticism focuses not on the problem of the disjunction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, which precludes the construction of an infinite self, but on the sense of limitation invoked by the experience of the sublime: the sense of striving that idealism imputes to the self which is born out of a fear of fragmentation is here translated into a perpetual longing for a sense of wholeness, a wholeness which intelligence becomes aware of as a potential in the failure of the sublime experience. The German romantic ironists (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter) embraced this understanding of limitation and analysed irony, not simply as satire, but as embodying something far more profoundly connected to self-reflection and self-criticism. Irony, for the German post-Kantians, embraced the limitation of self-knowledge, challenging universal truth claims in a manner that anticipates modern literary theory. Because of this they came to view art and philosophy as common pursuits. Friedrich von Schlegel, an important contributor to the thinking and theorising of the German romantic ironists, in a fragmentary and aphoristic fashion theorises a close relationship between literature and philosophy, and although he advances the importance of the creative imagination in the production of the work of art, he also notes that it is ‘equally fatal for the mind to have a system as to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.’170 Many of Schlegel’s interpreters emphasise the progressive and universal character that he attributes to poetry (Schlegel’s program of Universalpoesie), and cite his stated commitment to the fusion of poetry, rhetoric, philosophy and indeed criticism: life, art, philosophy and music are all, supposedly, integrated within an ideal totality, one that becomes dissonant only with the distortion and imposition of the one-sided rationalist scheme of the Enlightenment. This sense of interpenetration includes gender and the ideal of androgyny is a part of the thematics of Schlegel’s novel Lucinde. As Firchow points out in his introduction to Lucinde and the Fragments, the novel is not conventional or traditional but ‘a fusing together of fictionalised philosophy, figurative morality and allegorical religion’.171 ‘I see here’, says Schlegel, ‘a wonderfully ingenious and meaningful allegory for the consummation of the masculine and the feminine in the full complete humanity.’172 Schlegel’s thinking about irony, indeed his deep consciousness of the very textual, rhetorical and interruptive nature of understanding into which irony provides an insight, is implicit in the very condition of what he calls ‘floating intelligence’. This is a relationship between subjective existence and the infinite, between the real and the ideal. For him, irony emerges out of the combination of a sense of art in life and a scientific intellect, in a meeting between a mature, complete philosophy of nature and a mature, complete philosophy of art. It comprises and gives rise to a feeling of the indissoluble conflict between what is limited and what is not limited.173



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Clearly, the peaceful union between the phenomenal realm of art and the noumenal realm of nature is a perpetually infelicitous promise, because the required coincidence between the two is impossible. Walter Benjamin’s reading of Schlegel’s work in ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’174 is produced in the context of identifying the emergence of a ‘philosophico-problem-historical’ moment, when the ‘Romantic concept of the criticism of art’, or ‘Kritik’, emerges in the history of the development of the concept of criticism. He says that when Kant reconfirmed ‘the possibility of thinking an intellectual intuition and its impossibility in the realm of experience’, German romantics were impelled to make this the index of philosophy’s highest aspirations. In Schlegel’s theory of criticism the epistemological foundation of the concept of criticism is the ‘I’ reflecting upon the ‘I’ in thinking, or in Schlegel’s words, ‘[t]he capacity of the activity that returns into itself, the ability to be the “I” of the “I”, is thinking. This thinking has no other object than ourselves.’175 Fichte, though he departs from the German romantics by limiting the ‘I’, was therefore crucial to their thinking. As Benjamin describes it, what appealed to them was his understanding of ‘immediate cognition’ where the free action of forms of intelligence are taken as content and transformed into new forms of knowing or consciousness. In fact for Fichte, the ‘I’ has two forms of infinite action, that is, reflection and positing: in this the ‘I’ is posited (‘I’) and then counter-posited through its representation (not ‘I’) a defining, determinate and infinite activity which finally leads to the absolute ‘I’ (the immediate consciousness of thinking or self-consciousness) where it coincides with reflection which is ‘arrested in the representation of representation’.176 Thus he limits the infinity of reflection by bringing it back to the absolute ‘I’. Schlegel (and Novalis), on the other hand, sought to retain the infinity of reflection but wanted to prevent it from being ‘an endless and empty process’ so they introduced the notion of interconnectedness. This interconnectedness is achieved by replacing Fichte’s positing ‘I’ with a thinking ‘self ’ where ‘every reflection is immediate in itself ’. Rather than a positing and counterpositing ‘I’ that returns to an ‘absolute “I” ’ frozen in reflection, you have a ‘thinking of thinking of thinking’ with ‘mediation through immediacies’ which is identified with the knowledge of thinking. Benjamin describes all of Schlegel’s theoretical philosophy as definable in terms of the absolute understood as the ‘medium of reflection’. Whereas Schlegel uses the metaphor of light, as in, ‘[i]n every idea the “I” is the hidden light, in each thought, one finds oneself ’, Novalis uses the notion of ‘self-penetration’ to describe the ‘unity of reflection and mediality’. Benjamin notes, as Schlegel’s thought develops, aphorisms aside, he does not eschew systemisation, though his habit of substituting education, harmony, religion, organisation, history, genius or, indeed, irony, for art as the absolute medium of reflection, gives it ‘the look of confusing multiformity’.177 Benjamin describes Schlegel’s thinking as ‘mystical’, but not eidetic or ecstatic: ‘Schlegel’s manner of thought’, he says, ‘unlike that of many mystics, is distinguished by its indifference to the eidetic; he appeals neither to intellectual intuitions nor to ecstatic states.’ The non-eidetic, non-ecstatic mystical is language, the ‘absolutely conceptual’ or ‘linguistic thinking’ including the ‘lightning flash of the imagination’ or wit. Benjamin quotes Schlegel in ‘On

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Incomprehensibility’ where he says that ‘words often understand themselves better than do those who use them … that there must exist among philosophical words … secret bonds of association’.178 When Benjamin starts discussing Schlegel’s concept of irony, he maintains that its relevance to his world picture is given undue importance because it confirms a theory of subjectivity. However, Benjamin reads a double inflection in romantic irony which links it to not only subjectivity, but to a mystical order in art and thus to criticism itself. For Benjamin, in Schlegel there are two different sorts of irony operating: an ‘ironisation of artistic form’ which ‘presents an objective moment in the work itself ’ and ‘assails the form without destroying it’ and the ironisation of the material which is linked to the subject and annihilates the material. The first form of ironisation is related to criticism in that it ‘irrevocably and earnestly dissolves the form in order to transform the single work into the absolute work of art, to romanticize it’. The ‘sense of the infinite’ requires both the rising above the work to despise and destroy what is loved and the ‘assimilation of the limited work to the absolute’. Benjamin introduces a double concept of form in order to distinguish between the subjective and objective forms of irony: The particular form of the individual work, which we might call the presentational form, is sacrificed to ironic dissolution. Above it, however, irony flings open a heaven of eternal form, the idea of forms (which we might call the absolute form), and proves the survival of the work, which draws its indestructible subsistence from that sphere, after the empirical form, the expression of its isolated reflection, has been consumed by the absolute form. The ironisation of the presentational form is, as it were, the storm blast that raises the curtain on the transcendental order of art, disclosing this order and in it the immediate existence of the work as a mystery.179

In contrast to this Aufhebung that Benjamin’s reading of Schlegel’s formal irony conveys, de Man’s begins ‘The Concept of Irony’ by staging the problematic of how to define irony and rates Schlegel’s essay ‘On Incomprehensibility’ and Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony as the two best works on irony. He argues that irony is rather a trope than a concept and yet its motion (saying one thing, meaning another) is the very exemplification of the ‘turning’ implicit in tropes, which seems to give it the ‘meta’ status of ‘the trope of tropes’, without adequately defining it as such. Part of the problem here is that irony has a specific performative function; in other words it has the power to bring into being a state of affairs: Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses. It allows us to perform all kinds of performative linguistic functions which seem to fall out of the tropological field, but also to be very closely connected with it. In short it is very difficult, impossible indeed, to get to a conceptualisation by means of definition.180

Clearly the problem of defining irony is a serious one, one that has occupied philosophers and critics alike and de Man focuses on two traditions of theorising, the American and the German. The American perspective (i.e. Wayne Booth) makes



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attempts at arresting irony because it recognises that once the possibility of irony is raised, doubt perpetuates negativity ad infinitum, dissolving ‘everything in an infinite chain of solvents’: only the desire to understand has the power to halt this dissolution. Obviously the stakes are very high here because it is the very possibility of controlling irony that will determine whether or not it is possible to read texts. But for de Man, the desire for closure is not necessarily enough: But what if irony is always of understanding, if irony is always the irony of understanding, if what is at stake in irony is always the question of whether it is possible to understand or not to understand?181

This is a key question: in other words, is irony simply a performative (i.e. a matter of the various ways irony can felicitously act to bring into being a state of affairs in which case it produces effects and remains distinguished from the process of understanding, and so can be understood), or is it somehow constitutive of understanding (i.e. irony and understanding are indistinguishable, understanding is irony). To help answer this question de Man turns to the German tradition and Schlegel’s ‘On Incomprehensibility’: here the problem of irony is explored in relation to the structure of the ‘self ’, rather than to English eighteenth-century fiction. But something at the centre of Schlegel’s insights on irony proved threatening to philosophers still working within the German Idealist tradition. Hegel and Kierkegaard, for example, adamantly resisted Schlegel’s work, especially the little book Lucinde. ‘Eine Reflexion’, a short chapter in the middle of the book seems to exemplify the threat of irony as presented by Schlegel: written as a philosophical treatise, much in the style of Fichte, this chapter can also be read as a description of the mechanical operation of sexual intercourse. But the fact that these two codes run in parallel is not the problem here; the serious threat is the constant disruption that the radical incompatibility of the codes produces: They interrupt, they disrupt, each other in such a fundamental way that this very possibility of disruption represents a threat to all assumptions one has about what a text should be.182

According to de Man, the threat that Schlegel exposes becomes a source of resistance to a whole tradition of German thinkers, which then attempts to diffuse the danger using three different strategies. The first strategy involves an aestheticisation of irony – linking it to artistic intention or device (Kunstmittel); the second views it as the dialectic of the self as a ‘reflexive’ structure; and the third inserts irony into a dialectics of history in the manner of Hegel or Kierkegaard. De Man’s reading of Fragments 37 and 42 of Schlegel’s Lyceum challenges the domestication of irony which is the raison d’être of these three strategies. The reading foregrounds the importance of Fichte in Schlegel’s work. De Man suggests that Fichte’s understanding of the self is not experiential or phenomenological; it is rather a logical category, one which is posited first by language. In other words, the self is a product of language’s ability to posit (setzen), or name, indeed the power of language to name anything at all. This de Man terms catachresis, defined as ‘the ability of language catachrestically to name anything, by

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false usage, but to name and thus to posit anything language is willing to posit’183 In Fichte, this positing is a double act: language catachrestically posits a self and, equally, a non-self. This self, then, like the Kantian self, is non-substantial, it is merely an act of language which acquires a ‘degree’ of existence by another act of language which negates it. In this way certain properties are isolated and it is this isolation that makes up the ‘self ’. Nevertheless, this is not a merely empty process because once isolated this configuration of properties can then enter into acts of judgement, which are, in fact, the ascertaining of similarities (synthetic judgements) and of differences (analytic judgements). Every synthetic or analytic judgement, in Fichte, implies also a thetic judgement, or a reflexive judgement: in terms of this logical system, then, this is the assertion of the existence of the ‘I’, of the subject, which is then available for predication. Again, this ‘I’ is linguistically constructed, but it starts to be thought of in experiential categories, as a self that is on the way to the transcendental. De Man goes on to indicate that the construction of these (linguistically derived) judgements is also the structuring of tropes: every judgement of similarity presupposes difference; every judgement of difference presupposes similarity; thus, every synthetic judgement involves an analytic judgement and vice versa. This transference of properties is the structure of metaphor: the motion in which properties are isolated, and acts of judgement occur, has the consequence of circulating properties within a system of knowledge, but it is also the circulation of tropes. Even the idea of the self ’s progression toward transcendency is structured as asymptote. He calls this the ‘epistemology of tropes’: ‘[t]his system is structured like metaphors – like figures in general, metaphors in particular’.184 Performative rather than cognitive, the original act of positing by language is moved along by activities of judgement which are, in fact, the activity of tropes. What occurs is an anamorphosis of tropes ‘in which all the tropological systems are engendered, as a result of this original act of positing’. For Fichte, according to de Man, this process is an allegory, or a narrative of the transformation of tropes into a system of tropes, the effect of which is of the self standing above its own experiences. It is important to remember that the self in this is an extremely negative conception of self, because it is thoroughly a product of the motion of tropes. However, even though this self is fundamentally a linguistic construction, and so insubstantial, it is not entirely ungrounded because it is subject and object of the allegorical operations in question. Schlegel’s understanding of the function and importance of irony begins with this understanding of the negativity of the self. Irony is like ‘a good Italian buffo’, for it is the disruption of narrative illusion, the aparte, the aside to the audience, by means of which the illusion of the fiction is broken.185

It is also like parabasis or anacoluthon, tropes of interruption or intrusion within a discourse or narrative, tropes used extensively by Sterne, Tieck, Proust and in Schlegel’s own novel Lucinde, with its double code. However, for Schlegel, irony does not consist merely in moments of, and various forms of, interruption in a narrative or discourse, but permanent interruption, or interruption at every moment, what he



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calls ‘permanent parabasis’, which is also poetry. De Man completes this ‘definition’ of the ‘concept’ of irony: irony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes. The allegory of tropes has its own narrative coherence, its own systematicity, and it is that coherence, the systematicity, which irony interrupts, disrupts.186

De Man cites Benjamin’s ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ and attributes this reading of parabasis to him by conflating the two different types of irony that are marked out in that essay, the irony of form which ‘assails the form without destroying it’, and the irony of material which annihilates. De Man says that Benjamin ‘sees the impact of the parabasis … the destructive power, the negative power, of the parabasis’ which is not ‘at all an aesthetic recuperation but, to the contrary, a radical, complete destruction of the form, which he calls “the critical act”, which undoes the form by analysis, which by demystification destroys the form’.187 Thus de Man’s allegory of reading does a violence to Benjamin’s essay and reconfigures ‘[t]he ironization of the presentational form [which] is … the storm blast that raises the curtain on the transcendental order of art, disclosing this order and in it the immediate existence of the work as a mystery (my emphasis)’188 as ‘[t]he irony is the radical negation, which, however, reveals as such, by the undoing of the work, the absolute toward which the work is underway’.189 Returning to the problematic that opened this section, it now becomes apparent that the relationship between aesthetics and ideology is not just a matter of determining to what extent the category of the aesthetic can be utilised for certain political ends, nor even whether it may be possible to salvage it for a critique of ideology, as a certain reading of the romantic ironists would suggest. On the contrary, de Man’s reading of Schlegel on irony indicates that understanding and judgement, the founding categories of modern aesthetics, are, like the self, merely insinuations, temporary, perpetually falling into the contradictions of time and language, because they are caught in the anamorphic motion of tropes, in this case the trope of tropes which is irony. Since aesthetic discourse has always worked in tandem with historical discourse, the implications of de Man’s reading are drastic and far-reaching. Eagleton roundly summarises, For de Man, an endless self-reflexive irony is now the nearest approach we can make to that classical transcendence, in an age when vertigo must serve as the index of veracity. In the shift from early to late capitalism, the liberal humanist subject has indeed fallen upon hard times, and must now be prepared to sacrifice its truth and identity to its freedom, a disseverance which the Enlightenment would have found unintelligible.190

Pace Eagleton, de Man’s allegorising approach to literary as well as philosophical texts installs in the reader a programme of work: ‘to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat’.191 The ethical imperative he sets up is not a Benjaminian hopefulness, but a concentrated and rigorous vigilance.

4

How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Low through the lone cathedral’s roofless aisles The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung: It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal! Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall. A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death Today, the breathing marble glows above To decorate its memory, and tongues Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms In silence and in darkness seize their prey.1   – Before thy memory, I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died, And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit Had been with purer nutriment supplied, Corruption would not now thus much inherit Of what was once Rousseau, – nor this disguise Stain that which ought to have disdained to wear it; If I have been extinguished, yet let there rise A thousand beacons from the spark I bore –2 These poetic extracts, taken from his early work Queen Mab (1813) and the poem he was working on when he was drowned in the Bay of Spezia, The Triumph of Life (1822), represent indicative moments in Shelley’s thinking about time and history, aesthetics and politics. Both of these poems exemplify Shelley’s use of figuration in the development of various themes that relate to his hope of human perfectibility, in the midst of the transience of nature and the inconstancy of the mind. ‘Of all the English Romantics’, Theresa Kelley notes, ‘Shelley is the only one who openly insists that allegory can be an imaginative and moral agent precisely because it is … a figure of “the difference latent in metaphor” ’.3 In fact, Shelley is adept at deploying allegory in a number of different ways: often in the creation of stable allegorical figures like

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Queen Mab in Queen Mab, or Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy, Anarchy and Death in The Mask of Anarchy, or Intellectual Beauty in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty; sometimes in more indirect ways that foreground instabilities that are endemic to language itself as with Prometheus Unbound or The Triumph of Life; and at other times he thematises the creation and ultimate insufficiency and failure of allegory, as when he uses it as a means of conceptualising the meaning of life, temporality and death in Alastor. In this last, Shelley seems, as Susan Brisman describes it, ‘imaginatively capable of endlessly inventing fictions’, not as she views it, however, to ‘defer redemption’,4 but to use every device possible to try to transform perception in the full knowledge of the transience of nature and the diremptive human condition. But Shelley’s writing has also been used to reflect on the character of literary language itself, the fact that it is ‘not reducible to meaning’ and ‘that it opens as well as closes the disparity between symbol and idea, between written sign and assigned meaning’.5 Geoffrey Hartman gives this as the character of commentary, ‘the oldest and most enduring literary-critical activity’ that ‘has always shown that a received text means more than it says (it is “allegorical”), or that it subverts all possible meanings by its “irony”—a rhetorical or structural limit that prevents the dissolution of art into positive and exploitative truth.’6 And, as we have seen, allegory also has a larger performative power that makes it more than a figure of transference or ‘othering’: it configures an alienated self and divided being and is the means by which the human sensorium is historically transfigured. In this the power of allegory exceeds the life of any one writer: this fact can be illustrated in the reception history of an oeuvre, Shelley’s being a exemplary case in point. Neil Fraistat, taking his lead from Paul de Man, has described the production and reception history of editions of Shelley’s texts as examples of prosopopoeia, a giving of face and figure which is simultaneously a defacement and disfiguring and a form of monumentalisation.7 This theoretical understanding is demonstrated most poignantly in the reception history of Shelley’s work partly because of the radical content of the writing, the laws against sedition that made publication difficult in his lifetime, but also because of the larger cultural discourses in which his works have been made to participate, both in his own lifetime and posthumously. Fraistat’s analysis is interesting because it foregrounds an added consideration in the thinking about allegory, that is, its relation to ideology. In ‘On the Concept of Irony’, de Man says ‘[i]rony and history seem to be curiously linked to each other’ and postpones addressing the topic until ‘the complexities of which we would call performative rhetoric have been more thoroughly mastered’.8 De Man’s work of course suggests that the kind of mastery proposed is an ongoing activity, one that makes the idea of mastery itself ironic. What Fraistat’s analysis helps us to remember, however, is that this giving of face and the destruction of face, this constant repetition of the attempt to be and to know, coupled with the shattering violence of graphing form onto form, takes place in an institutional framework that is not exclusively linguistic and tropological, but embedded in a world of intrigue, commerce, ideology and politics where our limited power to act is made more freely available for some than for others. This insight is inherently Shelleyan, who, reading and writing from the inside of an



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allegorical mode constituted by his own alienation and the Humean/Godwinian philosophical doctrine of necessity that he embraced, understood, unlike Coleridge, the importance of turning allegory to affect a radical politics. From the beginning of his writing career up until the last works Shelley is absorbed with the question of social reform.9. Even his early Gothic novels, so long neglected, are now recognised for political themes that get developed in his more mature works.10 To attempt to separate his politics from his aesthetics, as Mary Shelley was compelled to do in 1824 with the publication of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley in order to present a respectable Shelley for middle class consumption, is to do a tremendous (allegorical) violence to the corpus of his work. Mary was clearly conscious of the fact that the edition she was producing would be a cultural performance, a carving up of a corpus and a process of figuration which would make Shelley acceptable for entry into a then formulating national canon. Her efforts were an absolute imperative given the weight of negative reviews of his work.11 And as Fraistat shows, the moment that Mary was forced, by Timothy Shelley, to withdraw the volume two months after its publication, the corpus immediately underwent another reshaping by the pirate publisher William Benbow, who was appealing to the market of radicals.12 So there is in the preparation of texts for reception, something deliberate at work. No less was there something deliberate involved in Shelley’s own energies in repeatedly shaping a process of mental transformation in keeping with his vision of intellectual beauty from which could be derived political and social transformation. This figuring of reform was an aspect of the Kunstwollen of the time, but Shelley also uses allegory idiosyncratically in keeping with his own philosophical/political vision. However, to view his art as simply mythopoetic, as many critics do, would be to take the thunder out of his vision, and the vision out of his allegory, a vision that was, as Earl Wasserman notes, built on two unassailable convictions: ‘his denial of a creative and superintending deity (together with a rejection of institutional Christianity and the doctrine of original sin) and his persuasion that human life was perfectible’.13 Though Shelley often uses myths in his great dramas, he for the most part configures them as narratives about mental life. His One Mind is human and divine insofar as it is enlightened: Harold Bloom gets it wrong when he tries to quarantine Shelley’s atheism by using ‘mythopoeic’14 (as opposed to mythographic) to characterise his work, and thereby, following Martin Buber, distinguish between an I-Thou relationship to an external world (typical of religiously inclined thinkers, primitive mythmakers and modern sophisticated poets) and I-It relations. Marilyn Butler, for example, makes the point that in the eighteenth century the sceptical habit of mind and the mythographic were used by many writers inspired by orientalist and philological studies like those of Sir William Jones as well as comparative religious studies to undermine the dominance of Christianity.15 Thus Shelley’s mythography also has a historiographical function which links it with Benjamin’s theory of Trauerspiel and with the allegorical experience. The connection between Benjamin and Shelley, moreover, is not merely thematic: in a conversation with Brecht in June 1938, Benjamin remembered that at a certain point the discussion turned to ‘poetry and to the translations of poems from various languages in the USSR with

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which Das Wort is flooded’.16 Brecht had at that time been editor for the left, antifascist journal for two years and had probably been influential in the inspiring of the many translations and commentaries published at that time on Shelley, with whom he, like the Left German Expressionists two decades earlier,17 in an unfaltering belief in the capacity of art to facilitate social transformation, was fascinated. In this he followed Engels, who was a devoted admirer of Shelley, knew his work by heart and also translated much of his poetry. The attraction was clearly the belief that Shelley’s poetry exemplified the integral connection between politics and literature, indeed that it contained a lyrical power to change the world. Brecht had himself at that time written a number of essays on Shelley as well as translated 25 of the 91 stanzas of The Mask of Anarchy in an essay called ‘Weite und Vielfalt der realistischen Schreibweise’ (‘Range and Diversity of the Realist Literary Mode’) as well as stanzas from Peter Bell the Third.18 Benjamin read the translation of Peter Bell the Third which prompted him to incorporate Shelley into his theory of allegory, as presented in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire’ and in ‘Zur Bilderflucht in der Allegorie’ (‘On Image-Flight in Allegory’) in The Arcades Project. In the latter work Shelley is used as a counterpoint to Baudelaire in the theory of allegory: On the flight of images in allegory. It often cheated Baudelaire out of part of the returns on his allegorical imagery. One thing in particular is missing in Baudelaire’s employment of allegory. This we can recognise if we call to mind Shelley’s great allegory on the city of London: the third part of “Peter Bell the Third,” in which London is presented to the reader as hell. The incisive effect of this poem depends, for the most part, on the fact that Shelley’s grasp of allegory makes itself felt. It is this grasp that is missing in Baudelaire. This grasp, which makes palpable the distance of the modern poet from allegory, is precisely what enables allegory to incorporate into itself the most immediate realities. With what directness that can happen is best shown by Shelley’s poem, in which bailiffs, parliamentarians, stock-jobbers, and many other types figure. The allegory, in its emphatically antique character, gives them all a sure footing, such as, for example, the businessmen in Baudelaire’s “Crépuscule du soir” do not have. Shelley rules over allegory, whereas Baudelaire is ruled by it.19

Early Shelley scholars would no doubt have found the claim that Shelley ‘rules over allegory’ somewhat puzzling. In 1820 The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Letters produced an unsigned review of Prometheus Unbound, for example, which claimed it was ‘merely opposition of words, phrases, and sentiments, so violent as to be utter nonsense’ full of ‘contradictory terms and metaphor carried to excess’, a poem that was ‘absolute raving’ written by a ‘lunatic’ and ‘symptomatic of a new disease in the literary world’.20, 21 William Hazlitt declared that Shelley’s style was ‘to poetry as astrology is to natural science’, by which he meant entirely unrelated, ‘difficult to read through, from the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous metaphors and violent transitions’, entirely ‘filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial’, in short, ‘abortions’.22 Matthew Arnold pronounced Shelley ‘incoherent’23 and made him, for the Victorians, ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’



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instead of the radical that he was.24 One might interpret this image differently and say that Arnold gets it almost right in that Shelley was, like Benjamin’s Angel of History, beating his wings; however, not ineffectually or in vain, but as a warning that there is a storm blowing in, not from Paradise, but from the accumulated corruption of the modern world. Unlike Benjamin, however, Shelley rejected the idea of creaturely original sin – evil was not ‘inherent in the system of creation’,25 though the two would have found common ground on the question of the ‘will to change’. Closer to the present, Cleanth Brooks described Shelley’s use of metaphor as ‘loosely decorative’ and ‘sometimes too gaudy’.26 Perhaps most damning was F. R. Leavis’s claim that Shelley’s poetry contained an ‘essential trait’ which was [a] general tendency of the images to forget the status of the metaphor or simile that introduced them and to assume an autonomy and a right to propagate, so that we lose in confused generations and perspectives the perception or thought that was presumably the raison d’être of imagery … 27

For Leavis, this indicated that Shelley had ‘a weak grasp of the actual’ [my emphasis].28, 29 Writing at approximately the same time as Benjamin, albeit from a different historically and culturally specific position, Leavis unknowingly but absolutely contradicts Benjamin’s evaluation. The puzzling final sentence of the Benjamin quotation – ‘Shelley rules over allegory, whereas Baudelaire is ruled by it’ – might be understood visually in the wonderful photograph of the demotic Viatka dolls published in Walter Benjamin’s Archive.30 The first doll depicts a man on a horse where the horse and man are clearly distinguishable; the second doll, on the other hand, depicts the horse and man as having merged in a single image. The power, and indeed, the epistemological and political danger of allegory is in precisely this ability to conceptually splice together ideas that are different in kind making them into a seemingly seamless whole. The dolls indicate a consciousness of this concept as a process. In Benjamin’s Kafka essay, the possible consequences of such mergers are described in terms of the ‘blessed horseman who rushes toward the past on an untrammelled, happy journey, no longer a burden on his galloping horse’ and the accursed ‘rider who is chained to his nag because he has set himself a future goal, even though it is as close as the coal cellar’.31 Shelley often juxtaposes an apostrophic ‘wonder of our being’, with an inevitable constitutional melancholy typical of an allegorical frame of mind. This paradoxical coexistence has been read by some critics as his ‘scepticism argument’ which is mobilised in a classical (for Shelley, Ciceronian) manner as a trope.32 In the essay ‘On Life’, the astonishing phenomenon of life from which we are shielded through sheer familiarity, is set next to the image of transience and fragmentation in human feeling, memory and the power of the will. The essay moves from the apostrophic to the disenchanted, from the high notes of ‘symbolic’ intellectualism to ‘allegorical’ melancholy and the scepticism of William Drummond’s Academical Questions. Language is unable to act as a medium for our being, consigned as it is to employment as a tool for expression. ‘How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being … we are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder is we grow

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dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.’33 The loss of language in the experience of perpetual transience coincides with mourning: Benjamin recognised that ‘[i]n all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable.34 In ‘On Life’ Shelley’s mourning takes the form of lamentation: ‘What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life.’35 As Anne Wroe rightly points out, Shelley was both a man and a poet36 and there is an important distinction between these two selves. In A Defence of Poetry he describes this difference in terms of what he calls the reoccurring emergence and disappearance of the ‘poetical power’: The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects on other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live.37

This repetition of poetic power followed by abandonment and return to the degenerating material forces of existence finds something of a reversed parallel in Benjamin’s understanding of the Fall as a process of ‘overnaming’ where linguistic being capitulates to allegory and mourning and can be redeemed only through a ‘weak messianic’ power. Shelley’s atheism and radical politics, on the other hand, preclude this kind of redemption and incline him more towards a Habermasian ‘overcoming’, as he embraces the concept of necessity which he derives from a joint reading of Hume and Godwin.38 And unlike Benjamin, he never attempts to theorise language beyond a straightforward Lockean empirical model. As Wasserman notes, ‘Shelley remained an empiricist in the tradition of Lock and Hume, clinging to the “axiom in mental philosophy that we can think of nothing which we have not perceived”.’39 Nevertheless, Shelley makes a Benjaminian distinction between poetic inspiration which has the power of (prelapsarian) harmony – ‘the life of man’, says Benjamin, ‘in the pure spirit of language was blissful’40 – and a use of language which is purely functional: ‘The words I and you and they are grammatical devices’ says Shelley, ‘ invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them’.41 This kind of functionality, however, is not a materialism akin to Saussurean signs held in a system in which there are only relationships producing meaning and no positive terms, for either Shelley or Benjamin. What Benjamin calls ‘the expression of [one] human mental life’ which is individuated only by specialisations communicated in not through ‘linguistic being’, is in Shelley described in terms of intellectual philosophy where the deictic markers ‘I, you, they’ are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind’42.



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Distinguishing between Benjamin and Shelley’s views of a unity underpinning perception can be done through the principle of sovereignty. In A Defence of Poetry, possibly Shelley’s most comprehensive (but by no means entirely coherent) theoretical statement, he makes the widely quoted claim that Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.43

In this passage we have a recasting of the principle of sovereignty which underpins the law of identity in Benjamin. There are several things going on here: poets are described as those who show ungrasped sacred inspiration, not prophets; those who mirror or faithfully represent the impending doom, the corporeal shadow that the future casts on the present; those through which words express without their intervention or understanding, those who inspire and signal into battle but are not affected by that which they inspire; those who are unmoved movers; and those who are the unrecognised (acknow) law makers of the world. Earlier he tells us that poets are not prophets, nor soothsayers as such because they are limited in knowing only the spirit rather than the form of events. Nevertheless, poets ‘participate in the eternal, the infinite and the one’, much like the poet in Hölderlin’s poem ‘Timidity’, but with an important qualification. Shelley’s poet has ‘conception’ or the power of forming in the mind, which sometimes is lost and then regained: what de Man once said of Montaigne, namely that his mind nourished and renewed itself on the ignorance of knowledge, ‘following new and incessant paths while being sustained by nothing but its own energy’44 could also be said of Shelley, though his energy was not faith. The end goal of the form-giving function in Benjamin’s reading of Hölderlin, on the other hand, is to relinquish the task of form-giving in the permanent merging of the spatial and intellectual orders: the form-giving will of the poet merges with the Volk and that of the universe in an ideal identity: ‘space is to be understood as the identity of situation and situated’, between ‘that which determines’45 and incorporates the ‘life’ of the people and becomes its poetic destiny. Conversely, Shelley is still the poet of Kant’s unenlightened earth: his lofty power of poetic form-giving is not from his own perspective, it appears, subject to the shaping power of history: it transcends what he calls ‘the grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place’.46 Language is merely a communicative tool, ‘only useful as it communicates ideas’47 and thoughts precede ideas in a Lockean sense. High poetry timelessly converts historical nuances into inspired knowledge: Aeschylus, Job, Dante and sculpture, painting and music all participate in this timeless sphere. Unlike Benjamin, for whom that timeless prelapsarian realm consisting of the linguistic being of all things is pure language, for Shelley, the timeless realm of poetry and all works of art is one of spiritual (read intellectual) beauty and this does not extend to all ‘things’, as it does with Benjamin, but is ‘created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is the curtained within the invisible nature of man’, or what might be called ‘pure poetry’.48

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Here sovereignty is not given as a principle underpinning an identity function in law, but is wholly substantial: the principle has concretised in the identity of the poet, the law-maker itself. Thus the mind of the poet is not to be dispensed with in the achievement of a poetic destiny, but is very much the sine qua non of his poetic world. However, the mind of the inspired poet is not consistently available, as inspiration often retreats: Shelley understands that reason and imagination are important but very different faculties of the mind, reason being the analytical principle that perceives causal relationships in thought, and the imagination being that which enfolds and synthetically raises up the analytical powers of reason with the production of other thoughts. Reason is linked to facts, and imagination is linked to the perception of values, and though they exist and function differently, imagination has the power to keep reason connected to moral and ethical action: ‘[r]eason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent; as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance’.49 This formulation replicates in part the distinction that Adam Smith makes between ‘bodily passions’ and ‘passions of the imagination’ where the imagination allows for a sympathetic union with the ordinary experiences of an ‘other’. Much has been written on the way in which the interaction between passions and imagination contribute to the thinking of self-determination. For example, the role of the imagination in educating the passions was integral to Smith’s theory of sympathy, which Shelley read. Smith argued that: [t]hough our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own person, and it is by imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.50

But this identification is not absolute and along with the imagined similarity comes difference: [s]ympathy, we shall allow, is much fainter than our concern for others, and sympathy with persons remote from us is much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous.51

Shelley’s overt universalist and pluralist theoretical statements from his early writings adopt the first of these two edicts, but not the second.52 This empiricist perspective, however, as many modern critics have recognised, is at odds with his ‘ambulatory’ style of thought which involves a ‘frequently questioning interaction with prevailing ideas’ that ends up being ‘nascent, provisional, constantly unfolding’.53 From this perspective Bloom’s claim that a Buber-like I-thou relationship is the basis of the mythopoeic in Shelley is unsustainable. As he says, for Buber every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou God, for God can



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only be addressed in the second person, never expressed in the third, the sphere of it. Man’s world as related to his I ultimately leads to the eternal Thou, God.54

In A Defence of Poetry Shelley says, [t]here is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in a lyre and produces not melody alone but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds and motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them in a determined proportion of sound, even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre.55

Thus he does not allegorise an I-Thou relationship; he allegorises the relationships within the mind with a view to awakening it through a congress with intellectual beauty and in the interest of political and social reform. This happens in an explicit way as early as Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes, for example. This poem is conventionally considered part of Shelley’s juvenilia and marginalised in relation to his later work, and this is partly because Shelley himself sought, after a point, to distance it from his mature works. There are conflicting opinions as to when it was composed exactly, but the evidence given in the child custody battle that took place after the suicide of his first wife Harriet suggests that he was just 19. The poem is full of all of the idealism and ardour of youth and although it is written when he is already a confirmed atheist, he is at this point still unable to entirely relinquish the notion of eternity: in a letter to Elisabeth Hitchener dated 11 December 1811, he says ‘[t]he wild American, who never heard of Christ, or dreamed of original sin, whose “Great Spirit” was nothing but the Soul of Nature, could not reconcile his feelings to annihilation: he too has his Paradise. And in truth is not Iroquois’s “human life perfected” better than to “circle with harps the golden throne” of one who dooms half of his creatures to eternal destruction? – This much for the Soul.’56 He then announces that he intends to write a poem which would be about ‘a picture of the manners, simplicity, and delights of a perfect state of society, tho’ still earthly’.57 The poem was originally intended to be ten cantos long and philosophical but not didactic58 appealing primarily to the children of aristocrats. As is well known, the notes to this poem were inflammatory at the time, too dangerous to publish properly because of the laws against seditious libel which applied to both writers and publishers, so Shelley published 250 copies himself and named himself as publisher.59 The poem opens with three epigraphs which place it firmly in the enlightenment camp: the first is Voltaire’s ECRASEZ L’FAME! (‘Crush the Demon!’), an invective against Christianity; the second is from Lucretius, who countered religious dogma with scientific materialism, and in this passage links poetry with renewal and freeing the mind from superstition; and the third, ‘[g]ive me a place to stand and I will move the earth’, is about the power of the lever, taken from Archimedes, who was used by enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine in linking mechanics with revolution.60 The notes corroborate the poem’s revolutionary intention: they cover themes such as cosmology; the corruption of kings and ministers; the smothering of the babies of

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reason by the mothers of religion; wealth and poverty; famine; the lack of regard for real art; the detrimental effects of unnecessary labour on the intellectual development of labouring classes; extortionate rents of landlords; love, law and sex; prostitution; marriage; the relationship between wisdom and disease; necessity; and atheism. This is the context, then, in which the allegorical figure of ‘Queen Mab’ comes to awaken the Soul from the slumbering body, and take it over the cosmos, freeing it further through a philosophico-political education. Mab is actually of Celtic origin: she is ‘a goddess of sovereignty’ (Maeve, Medb) to whom Irish kings needed to be ritually married in order to legitimise their reign. In addition to sovereignty, Mab presided over ‘war, sexuality and intoxication’.61 As a figure, she already existed in the English fairy-tale tradition and she figures in Romeo and Juliet in her role as benefactor of dreams. The narrative that unfolds depicts Mab arriving in her chariot to awaken the Soul of Ianthe from her slumbering body and carry it through an educative journey. It is also an erotic journey, as Henry gazes over her sleeping body – ‘all beautiful in naked purity’ – throughout the narrative. Christopher Miller argues that ‘[d]espite its anti-religious opinions, the poem harks back to the Christian allegories of Pilgrim’s Progress and Piers Plowman, as well as the instruction of Adam in Paradise Lost, both pedagogical (Raphael’s prelapsarian colloquy) and prophetic (Michael’s postlapsarian survey of human events).62 I would prefer the term allegory to fairytale, however, because, although the poem’s implied readership are aristocratic children, the story itself is an allegory of the graphing process, where the pure Soul of Ianthe is inscripted with the highest order of teaching about the universe. If Benjamin finds in Shelley a grasp that eludes Baudelaire and to which he ultimately falls victim, it has been argued that de Man’s own critico-linguistics is prefigured by Shelley’s thinking about poetics generally. In her essay ‘A Defence of Rhetoric/The Triumph of Reading’, Deborah Esch states that ‘the theory of language (and the concomitant theory of reading) that de Man generates out of The Triumph of Life stands in a position of instructive interrelation to Shelley’s own explicit theorising notably in Defence of Poetry: more particularly, de Man’s terminology and critical procedures are to a telling extent prefigured in Shelley’s reflections on the nature and function of poetic language.’63 As she notes, de Man’s understanding of language generated out of his reading of The Triumph of Life includes two heterogeneous, asymmetrical, but interarticulating models: language as figuration and language as act. Figuration is associated with ‘the cognitive function of language as a structure of sense making’ and is bifurcated: it includes a sensory (or aesthetic) stage as meaning is brought into line with a law of articulation (or joining) which marks the place for ‘reiteration of meaning by substitution’. This structure then passes into another stage, one of figural arrangement (in de Man’s words ‘the modification of a knowledge into the surface on which this knowledge ought to be recorded’), which includes the grammatical and syntactical laws of organisation. The second very different model describes the impositional power of positing: the arbitrary force of utterance as act. The passage between stages and between models in the drive to articulate, necessarily produces a disarticulation, and the need to start again.64 This is illustrated most acutely in what is considered Shelley’s first substantial poem after Queen Mab, that is, Alastor.



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Alastor is structurally and thematically very different from the earlier poem. The poetry from 1815–16 is full of images that lament the transience of existence and the inconstancy of the intellect. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc also thematise the question of the nature of death. Shelley had addressed the question of life after death in his ‘Essay on a Future State’ where he reverses his earlier optimism and approaches the question through natural philosophy in which there are two different opinions, one that supposes ‘that intelligence is the mere result of certain combinations among the particles of its objects’, and the other which affirms ‘the interposition of a supernatural power which shall overcome the tendency inherent in all material combination to dissipate and be absorbed into other forms’.65 Though he probes the question philosophically, and asserts that some things are unknowable, the emphasis is on the first opinion: he says, ‘[s]leep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principles; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiocy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually withers, and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does it with the body sink into decrepitude.’66 Alastor is a poetic exploration of the question of death and what Shelley allegorises in this poem is glossed in the preface as ‘one of the most interesting situations of the human mind’.67 Most critics agree, however, that the poem is disjunctive and doesn’t support the claims made in the preface. Mary Shelley tells us that the poem is the outcome of an experience in which Shelley believed his death imminent, a product of his brooding mind in the contemplation of that death. Thus, the poem can be read as an attempt in various ways to reach an understanding of a mystical unknown in a life on the journey towards death and it sets up possible scenarios that try to achieve that end. What is most interesting about this poem, however, is that it consists of two poets, one acting as visionary and the other allegorising both the figure of the poet and his melancholic journey which ultimately ends in death. The two contrasting figures in this poem have prompted speculation as to their relationship. Earl Wasserman views these as Narrator and Visionary who have two contrasting views of life, the former lamenting ‘the wasted and tortured life of one pursued’, and the latter ‘a zealous pursuit, however illusory, of a good beyond the limits of an inherently inadequate and negligible world’.68 Michael O’Neill, on the other hand, reads the two figures as overlapping and blending.69 A third reading would be that, although for the most part the two figures seem to merge, it is more useful to read them as separate because one is figured symbolically, is the figure of presence, and the other figures and disfigures the wandering journey of the visionary. The conflict between the symbolic and the allegorical mode in this poem is prefigured at the start with a two invocations which seem to cancel each other out. The poem begins by calling upon a brotherhood to which the poet speaking belongs – earth, ocean, air – and with whom he shares a Mother. This context is then developed in a series of correspondences presented in the form of conditionals that link a reciprocal love with time and the animate world: in the first four lines the poet sets in alignment his feeling of love from the personified ‘brotherhood’ of elements and his love for that brotherhood. To this is added a series of natural oppositions related to times of the day, and then times of the year: morn,

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noon, sunset and midnight which are given sensuous attributes, dewy, odorous, gorgeous, solemn are juxtaposed with times of the year, autumn, winter, spring. The attributes associated with them are personified in relation to their natural contexts: ‘hollow sighs in the sere wood’, ‘robing with pure snow and crowns of starry ice’, ‘voluptuous pantings when she breathes her first sweet kisses’. These juxtapositions are then taken together as cherished ‘dear to me’ and put in opposition to a cherishing of bird, insect or gentle beast. The final conditional is that if all of this is not the case, then the invoked elements should ‘forgive the boast’ and continue with the historical and accustomed ‘favour’. The following stanza repeats the form of the invocation, but this time directs it to the Mother, meanwhile cancelling out the woven unit based on potentially reciprocal love, developed in the first stanza, that is, by declaring the world impenetrable. This repetition of the invocation begins with a request to favour the ‘solemn song’, for he has loved, as he says, ‘thee ever, and thee only’, thus resolving the conditionals in the first stanza, by making them false. The idea of motherhood suggests birth and nurturing, but this Mother is something of a shadowy, dark and mysterious threshold figure whom the poet watches persistently with a transfixed ‘heart’ and which, in a line that could have come from Baudelaire, leads him to sleep in graveyards: ‘where black death /Keeps record of the trophies won from thee’. The hope, we are told, is that the poet will come across a ghost, the messenger of the Mother whom he will ‘force’ to ‘render up the tale/Of what we are’. Thus what the poet is expecting is not absolute knowledge, or revelation, but a ‘once upon a time’ narrative. This is the stance of the allegorist, the writer who is poised in threshold conditions in order to formulate an answer, through alchemy or magic or intercourse, to the question of ‘what we are’. The desire to answer this question is propelled in this poem by an intimation that has come through ‘incommunicable dream’, ‘twilight phantasms’ and ‘deep noon-day thought’, but remains phantasmagoric rather than definitive. Thus the poet waits serenely and motionless like ‘a long-forgotten lyre/Suspended in the solitary dome/Of some mysterious and deserted fane’ for the words (‘breath’) of the Mother which will harmonise such disparate things as the ‘murmurs of the air’, ‘the motions of the forest and the sea’, ‘the voice of living beings’, ‘woven hymns/Of night and day’ and ‘the deep heart of man’. Stanza three is a third attempt at beginning, with a narrator’s ‘once upon a time’ ‘[t]here was a poet’ which then goes on to describe the poet’s untimely, lonely, unremarked, unknown death after a life of solitude: ‘He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude’. This death is absolute, for whatever passion his song and his eyes may have inspired in strangers in his life, with his death ‘Silence, too enamoured of that voice/ Locks its mute music in her rugged cell’. The fourth stanza is another new beginning, this time with infancy which is both exceptional and alienated, nurtured with ‘solemn vision’, ‘bright silver dream’, ‘sound from the vast earth and ambient air’ and ‘divine philosophy’, and equally, estrangement from home which leads him to wander in search of other truths in ‘undiscovered lands’. This juxtaposition of ‘alienated home’ and ‘undiscovered lands’ again drives a wedge into the core of signification itself, between the signifier and the signified which it will be the problem of this part of



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the poem to overcome. One way of doing it is aesthetically and that is precisely what happens here. By virtue of a long coexistence with the natural world coupled with his philosophical bent of mind, the poet is transformed into the figure of intellectual beauty: ‘he has bought/With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men/His rest and food’ and ‘made the wild his home/Until the doves and squirrels would partake/From his innocuous hand his bloodless food/Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks’ which can transfix even the nervous wild antelope. However, the poem does not sustain this potential for continuity, for in the fifth stanza, once again the poem breaks as the syntax of the narrator brings the tale forward into the immediacy of the present moment in the recollection of the visitation of ruins of the past in other lands. The aesthetic union depicted in the previous stanza gives way here to contemplation figured in the concentrated gaze of the poet: Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble daemons watch The Zodiac’s brazen mystery, and dead men Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, He lingered, poring on memorials Of the youth’s world, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes, not, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed until meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.70

What we have in this stanza is a unique approach to the relationship between time and history. In Benjamin’s materialist historiography the allegorical marks the advent of time and history from the seventeenth century onward in its relation to the image of death and the gradual death of human sensibility, retrievable only through the ‘weak messianic’ power of the dialectical image. Time in Benjamin is depicted on a cosmological and a collective scale, rather than in terms of the individual and it is aperceptual distraction that helps to manage the anxiety of death. For de Man reading Wordsworth, this cosmological stance is reduced to an experience of the self where the self ’s experience of time is mediated by death: … it is the experience of mortality that awakens within us a consciousness of time that is more than merely natural. This negativity is so powerful that no language could ever name time for what it is; time itself lies beyond language and beyond the reach of the imagination. Wordsworth can only describe the outward movement of time’s manifestation, and this outward movement is necessarily one of dissolution, the ‘deathward progressing’, of which Keats speaks in The Fall of Hyperion.71

De Man cautions that it is not aperceptual distraction that allows for the management of anxiety but absolute and unflinching concentration. Shelley, on the other hand,

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in the quoted stanza above, critiques Benjamin and de Man’s insights in an image of mute, concentrated, sustained and general watchfulness which includes the images that are the remains of ‘more than man’ and ‘dead men’, a sustaining gaze ‘where marble demons watch’ and the solitary wanderer joins in and sustains the gaze that is concentrated on ‘the youth of the world’ as the sensation of the day changes from ‘burning’ to moonlit ‘floating shades’. This posture towards death is not ‘beyond the imagination’ but filled with images of ‘mute’ thoughts’ on ‘mute walls’ and the gaze is sustained until meaning ‘flashed like strong inspiration’ on the tabula rasa of his mind, which allows him to see not utter negativity, but birth, the ‘thrilling secrets of the birth of time’. From this stunning crescendo, however, which leaves the reader and the poet suspended, we are forced back into the narrative with ‘meanwhile’ and a mundane narrative of an Arab maiden who feeds and tends him in his sleep, and doesn’t speak her love. And then ‘[t]he Poet wanders on’ until the tale of wandering is again broken with a dream vision which is another allegorisation of death. This time, however, death is explored through a dream of perfect love which ends in orgasm and then sleep. Shelley again uses the image of suspension given in the earlier stanza, but here it is not the gaze that is suspended in contemplation of time, but voice, music and colour in the dream of intellectual beauty: He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her themes, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thought the most dear to him, and poesy, Herself a poet.72

Thus, Shelley shifts from an intellectual to a sensual and aesthetic register which incorporates epistemological, moral and political themes. Suspension in the voice, music and colour of intellectual beauty produces in the maid passion and an ‘ineffable tale’ told with ‘some strange harp’, through her body: her ‘branching veins’, her ‘eloquent blood’, her breath and the ‘beating of her heart’. The bodily tale leads to the completion of the dream as the poet and the maid intermingle in passion and love: Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom: … she drew back a while,



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Then yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms, Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, Like a dark flood suspended in its course, Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.73

In the depiction of passion Shelley produces another suspension, this time suspension of suspension, that of sleep which is like the flow of dark water immobilised. Here the allegory of love becomes an allegory of death figured as sleep. The analogy between sleep and death is one that, as we have seen, structures the movement of Queen Mab and instantiates an allegory of spiritual and political awakening; here however, the analogy is questioned when the movement of the poem breaks again as the narrator cedes to the poet who is ‘Roused by the shock’ of the last suspension and the poem is brought back to the present and stark reality. A series of questions ensue: ‘Wither have fled/The hues of heaven that canopied his bower/Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,/The mystery and majesty of Earth/The joy, the exultation?; Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined/Thus treacherously?’; ‘Does the dark gate of death/Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,/O Sleep?’; ‘Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds,/And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,/Lead only to the black and watery depth./While death’s blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung,/Where every shade which the foul grave exhales/Hides its dead eye from the detested day,/ Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?’74 And the poem breaks again as the poet wanders on and the dream and the watery suspension haunt his thoughts. It is at this point in the poem that the two contrasting figures again become distinguishable as independent agents: one which lyrically questions the nature of death; the other resuming the business of figuring and disfiguring the narrative, giving face and defacing the visionary. If Alastor is an exploration of allegory as the interaction with and othering of symbolic expression, The Cenci is a dramatisation of allegory with an idealist turn. It stands out in the Shelley oeuvre as the only drama intended for the stage in that it is about the reality of the world rather than visionary. What the poem dramatises is something Benjamin calls the ‘allegorical experience’ and it unfolds very much along the same lines as the German Trauerspiel, as described in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The story, written as a tragedy ‘eminently fearful and monstrous’, is based ostensibly on a true story. It is staged primarily in Rome at the time of the Pontificate of Clement VIII (1592–1600). Shelley and his new wife Mary came across the story itself in 1819 after having viewed a portrait of Beatrice Cenci, the key protagonist in his play, which they thought at the time to be by Guido Reni. The story, documented in Annali d’Italia by Ludovico Antonio Muratori, involved a demonic and tyrannical father, Count Cenci, who rapes his daughter Beatrice and then is murdered by her in a premeditated manner with the co-operation of three co-conspirators, her stepmother Lucretia, her brother Giocomo and her suitor Orsino. The opening irony

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is that the Pontificate of Clement VIII is one that promotes the strict moral code of the Counter-Revolution, with edicts banning prostitution and nude swimming, but the drama begins with a scene depicting a corrupt Cardinal Camillo offering to suppress a murder the Count has committed in exchange for the transfer of some of his land to the Pope. The interaction reveals the Count to have been corrupted through the pursuit of pleasure which turns his ‘strong soul’ ever more perverse and murderous, and which horrifies even the corrupt Cardinal. In the following scene Beatrice and the priest Orsino converse about petitioning the Pope to release him from his vows so that he can act as her protector, revealing her to be an icon of morality in the midst of absolute corruption which includes the Church, her father, and Orsino himself. Cenci prays for the death of his two sons whom he has sent to Salamanca and when they are reported to have died, at the same hour on the same night by different means, the Count holds a banquet to celebrate. He horrifies his guests with his exultation and his commending of their souls to the Devil in Hell by calling the wine he drinks their blood and then offering it to the guests. Beatrice appeals to the guests for protection, but the guests fear the Count who then, claiming that he doesn’t want to subject them to domestic quarrels, dismisses them all. In the second Act Cenci accuses his wife Lucretia of encouraging Beatrice’s betrayal and threatens to imprison them. All hope for protection is lost when the petition to the Pope is returned unopened. Giacomo, the Count’s eldest son, and Orsino discuss the family’s predicament and Orsino suggests that the Count be murdered. In Act III, Beatrice enters the stage, clearly broken by the Count’s final venal act of incestuous rape, calls for murder and Lucretia, Giacomo and Orsino conspire to the act, agreeing that the servants Marzio and Olimpio should carry out the murder. Act IV takes place in an apartment in the Castle of Petrello where the servants murder Cenci by strangulation and all the conspirators except Orsino are arrested. In the end, all of the conspirators confess except Beatrice who maintains her innocence. Act V stages the trial and conviction of the murders who go to their deaths, with Beatrice holding up her head in dignified resignation. Thus, we have in this drama, all the elements of the German Trauerspiel: the fallen world is represented with the corruption of sovereignty, which includes the Pope, the Cardinals, and the aristocracy, and the powerlessness of the protagonists to prevent the figuration of their fate – the rape, the murder and their execution. Though the Count is made to pay for the crime, it is against the law, hence the conspirators must follow him in his fate. The Cenci does dramatise the kind of symbolic collapse typical of allegorical temporality as depicted in the Benjamin’s Origin, nevertheless, it does not end in chaotic uncertainty. However corrupt the Count, to murder is morally wrong and legally prohibited, so Beatrice and her co-conspirators must accept the legal consequences of their action. Peter Bell the Third, a poem admired by Benjamin and included in his theory of allegory and The Arcades Project, was written quickly in October of 1819 in the context of critical reviews conducted in the Examiner about Wordsworth’s poem Peter Bell. On 14 April 1819, John Hamilton Reynolds, knowing through his association with Leigh Hunt and the ‘young poets’ of the Examiner that Wordsworth’s poem would be published shortly, wrote a parody of Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy and called it Peter



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Bell. Wordsworth’s poem was then published on 24 April. These poems were reviewed by John Keats and Leigh Hunt respectively with Hunt critiquing Wordsworth’s Peter Bell negatively in the light of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen.75 Wordsworth’s poem was probably doomed from the beginning because, as Cameron tells us, after the announced publication, it was ‘rumoured to deal with the religious regeneration of a hardened sinner through a chance meeting with a noble donkey’.76 Very soon the wits sharpened their pencils! Although there has been some question as to whether Shelley’s scandalous response was based on the reviews alone, evidence indicates that he received a copy of the poem sometime in October, read it and began composing his own Peter Bell the Third immediately, sending it off to Hunt on 2 November for immediate publication with Ollier.77 In the letter to Hunt that contained the manuscript he called his poem ‘very heroic’78 and asked that it be published anonymously for the reason that he had written it quickly and he had much more important material coming out. However, it was not published until 1840, 20 years after the publication of Wordsworth’s poem, so the impact it was supposed to have never materialised.79 In fact Shelley had already demonstrated disappointment in Wordsworth’s writing in a poem called ‘To Wordsworth’ published in the Alastor collection of 1816: in that poem he regrets the relinquishment of ‘honoured poverty’ and ‘songs consecrate to truth and liberty’.80 But by 1819, the year Peter Bell the Third was written, Shelley had reached an intellectual peak in the quality of his poetic-political output. This was the year he wrote his sonnet ‘England in 1819’ describing a country ruled by an ‘old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king’ and people ‘starved and stabbed in the untilled field’ and ‘[g]olden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay’,81 and a highly productive year in which he wrote some of his greatest revolutionary works: ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, The Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound, Ode to the West Wind, Julian and Maddalo. So although Peter Bell the Third was written quickly, it is, nevertheless, a carefully constructed satirical and politically revolutionary allegory, directed at a poet, whom he deemed to have capitulated to conservative politics, one whom he once admired, but considered ‘dull’ after the publication of The Excursion. Much of the criticism of this poem addresses the question of whether or not satire as a form of ‘demonization’82 is a suitable form for promoting a responsible politics. Shelley himself was conflicted on this question as is borne out by his repeated appeals to Ollier to ‘completely conceal the author’, should he decide to publish it.83 The poem is written under the pseudonym ‘Miching Mallecho, Esq.’, which since Shakespeare’s Hamlet has signified mischief, and indeed Hamlet is cited in the epigraph below the title. The ‘Dedication’, is written to Thomas Brown Esq., the Younger, H. F., which is according to Cameron a veiled reference to Thomas Moore’s satire The Fudge Family, H. F. being an acronym for ‘Historian of the Fudges’, and a parody of the dedication to Robert Southey, Esq., P. L. meaning ‘Poet Laureate’ in Wordsworth’s poem. But then the ‘Dedication’ format changes immediately into an intimate letter beginning with ‘Dear Tom’ asking for Mr. Peter Bell to be introduced to the ‘respectable family of the Fudges’. From then, on close reading, Mary Shelley’s attempt to ameliorate the sting of the poem by claiming that nothing personal was meant other than Shelley

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believing that the use of poetry to foster error must mean that the poet has been ‘infected with dullness’ seems disingenuous.84 In the very second sentence he describes Peter Bell as falling short of ‘the more active properties of the Rat and the Apostate’. Nevertheless, what is most interesting about this dedication, something none of the commentators seem to address, is the manner in which he sets up an allegory of a trinity of dullness and apostatism modelled on the divinity of holy trinity: There is this particular advantage in an acquaintance with any one of the Peter Bells, that if you know one Peter Bell, you know all three Peter Bells; they are not one but three; not three, but one. An awful mystery, which, after having caused torrents of blood, and having hymned by groans enough to deafen the music of the spheres, is at length illustrated to the satisfaction of all parties in the theological world, by the nature of Mr. Peter Bell.85

What appealed to Benjamin was probably the claim that ‘it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery’ and the allegory of the apostate’s descent into Hell is very much of this world. The poem is divided into a Prologue followed by seven highly significant parts: Death, The Devil, Hell, Sin, Grace, Damnation and Double Damnations. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition the number seven signifies, among other things, the seven days of creation or the infusion of godliness into creation. Thus Shelley’s poem sets up an earthly equivalent of the allegory of creation but inverts it, making it an allegory of earthly damnation. The Prologue describes the differences between the three Peters-in-one: Peter Bell the First is ‘[b]orn from that world into this’; the second is predestined, in other words free, to do either good or evil, but is ‘an evil Cotter’ whom the footnote tells us can be read as not a ‘polygamic Potter’, but a ‘dodecagamic Potter’, a prefix which introduces the number twelve into a description suggesting a link with Judas Iscariot of the Christian tradition; and finally the third Peter Bell who is deservedly damned eternally to Hell. Thus the poem allegorises the journey of an intellect into pragmatism and consort with the Devil who turns out to be without ‘hoof, nor tail, nor sting’ but is quite ordinarily human, ‘what we are’, sometimes ‘a gentleman’, sometimes ‘a bard bartering rhymes/For sack’, sometimes ‘a swindler’, ‘a thief ’, or indeed sometimes he appears as ‘a slop-merchant from Wapping’. In the third part of the poem the allegory of intellectual demise is named ‘Hell’, which is ‘a city much like London’. As mentioned, Benjamin admired Shelley’s ‘great allegory on the city of London’ and he quotes nine stanzas from this section of the poem in The Arcades Project, I–X, leaving out the following eighth stanza: There are mincing women, mewing, (Like cats, who amant misere,) Of their own virtue, and pursuing Their gentler sisters to that ruin. Without which – what were chastity?

Given the role that the prostitute plays in Baudelaire, indeed Benjamin sees her as the dialectical image par excellence in his poetry, it is perhaps understandable that Benjamin leaves this stanza out. For Shelley, the prostitute is a construct created as



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a necessary opposition to chastity, which makes the narrow Christian moral code on sexuality meaningful; whereas for Benjamin she is an emblem of a deadening sensorium and commodity fetishism. What Benjamin values in this poem, on the other hand, is the way ‘the big city is evoked through nothing but the immediate presentation of its inhabitants’ where ‘one encounters merely traces of a similar perception – though a good many traces’ in the poetry of Baudelaire. Immediacy of presentation, however, is not a characteristic of Shelley’s poem The Triumph of Life which has inspired many scholarly interpretations,86 some of which, in recent times, have focused on whether it is about historical progress or regress. Since the poem is unfinished – it was the poem he was working on when he drowned – all scholarly commentaries are necessarily a matter of informed guesswork. It is also a poem that has been subject to a considerable number of editorial changes by different editors, including Mary Shelley in the three editions of his poems that she produced in 1824, 1839 and 1847.87 W. M. Rossetti even set about altering the manuscript for the purpose of ‘correcting’ errors because he felt that it was in such an unfinished state.88 Be that as it may, de Man’s essay on the poem entitled ‘Shelley Disfigured’ not only radically challenged mainstream approaches to the poem but effectively brought his own writing about reading to a watershed moment. He admits to a sort of facing-up, a turn in thinking, with this encounter. In the Preface to The Rhetoric of Romanticism, he confesses to a frustration at not being able to get beyond breaks and interruptions in order to produce some kind of dialectical summation in his readings of romantic writers. Unlike Adorno, who, reading Hölderlin, advanced that the key function of parataxis was poetic, the attempt to incorporate subjective expression into language which otherwise ‘reduces what is to be expressed to something already given and known’,89 de Man finds his own falling back on parataxis and aphorism more of an abdication than a virtue, ‘an attempt to recover at the level of style what is lost at the level of history’. Using a fragmentary mode to describe the inevitability of fragmentation, he says, ‘restores the aesthetic unity of manner and substance’ and this ‘may well be what is in question in the historical study of romanticism’. It is in reading Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, he claims, that he is finally able to address the problematic of history and fragmentation.90 As indicated in the last chapter, de Man will go on from here to demonstrate why the impasse that he comes to in his reading of Shelley goes beyond mere problems of syntax and diction and enters the very heart of philosophical figuration. De Man’s essay has met with much disapproval by mainstream romantic critics, mostly because it is a virtuoso piece of ‘deconstructive’ analysis, but also, perhaps, because he makes the claim that the Triumph ‘can be said to reduce all of Shelley’s previous work to nought’.91 In other words, this essay challenges the kind of naive monumentalisation typical of the romantic frame of mind and romantic criticism itself. This naivety involves the kind of ‘repression of self-threatening knowledge’92 implied in Henry Lefabvre’s definition of monumentalisation: A monumental work, like a musical one, does not have a ‘signified’ (or ‘signifieds’); rather, it has a horizon of meaning: a specific or indefinite multiplicity of

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meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of – and for the sake of – a particular action […] To the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror.93

This understanding of the role of the monumental work produces what de Man calls ‘recuperative and nihilistic allegories of historicism’ or reality-denying allegories that ignore the lesson embedded in Shelley’s poem. De Man reads the poem as a thematisation and a deconstruction of the whole question of this kind of monumentalisation. He begins his essay with the statement that The Triumph of Life is ‘a fragment that has been unearthed, edited, reconstructed, and much discussed’94 and concludes with the claim that it ‘warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.’95 The essay is a rich one and bears explication so infused as it is with the entire Shelley oeuvre, not to mention, among others, that of Rousseau. It accounts for many aspects of Shelley’s writing generally, grapples with the problems of reading, and links the act of reading with signification and then the question of the disfigurement of history. These are not themes applied to, but derived from, Shelley’s poem. A clue to the direction the essay will take is in the epigraph which is from Thomas Hardy’s short story ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’, a narrative about status and power, love, vanity and obsession, but also about disfigurement, memory and ultimately the question of history. The story was written in 1890, 68 years after Shelley’s poem and although it thematises many of the concerns that de Man reads in the Triumph, what is absent is the kind of consciousness which leads to ontological questioning, which is an important aspect of Shelley’s poem. Problematics of memory and history are depicted in the scene from the story that de Man chooses for the epigraph. The Sixth Earl of Uplandtowers digs in the grounds of the estate that he has inherited from his uncle, the Fifth Earl, in order to build new foundations in expanding the Hall. In the process, the broken fragments of the marble statue of Edmond Willowes, the first husband of his uncle’s wife Barbara, are unearthed, which the Earl as second husband had disfigured to represent Willowes’ true appearance after the fire that maimed him, destroyed his beauty and led to the couple’s estrangement. The Sixth Earl, who was not close to the family and knows nothing of this history, seeks out ‘various antiquaries’ to learn the history of the fragmented marble statue and these people engage in a kind of guesswork, finally deeming it to be either a ‘mutilated Roman satyr’ or ‘an allegorical figure of Death’.96 This epigraph to the essay, then, which invokes the Hardy story, is what de Man would call an arbitrary act of ‘positing’, a crucial act of language which only retrospectively can be ‘seen and misunderstood as a substitution and a beginning’.97 De Man demonstrates with the inclusion of this epigraph precisely how ‘a positional act, which



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relates to nothing that comes before or after’ can become ‘inscribed in a sequential narrative’ and how ‘a speech act’ becomes a ‘trope, a catachresis which then engenders in its turn the narrative sequence of an allegory’.98 The narrative sequence that ensues describes the depiction of forgetting and disfigurement in the poem which gives the lie to theories of linear history, progressive or regressive. The Triumph itself is enigmatic, but it opens with another act of positing which is the springing forth of the sun at the dawn of day intimating new beginnings as the darkness of night dissolves. The poet, who has been awake all night, stretches out beneath what he believes to be a chestnut tree, becomes engulfed in a trance and has what seems to be a déjà vu experience. A vision is then ‘rolled upon’ his brain, a ‘waking dream’, where he witnesses the machinations of an oblivious, unthinking, purposeless, and rushing crowd and the speedy arrival and passing of the figure of eroding Life inside a chariot. The chariot is carried by a ‘wonder-winged team’ which is being badly guided by a blind four-faced Charioteer, an image which enthrals the crowd, and which ultimately passes over all leaving no other trace than that ‘of foam after the ocean’s wrath’ (line 162).99 The impact of the scene on the poet initiates a series of archaeological questions which de Man argues is one of the main structures of the poem and relates them to ‘the interpretive labour characteristic of romanticism’. His own essay is no less enigmatic than Shelley’s poem: the structure of archaeological questions, which is that of probing origins, is also the means by which we are ‘prompted’ to ‘deduce the present from the identification of the more or less immediately anterior past’.100 So one of the main structures of the poem is an ‘archaeology’ of history. De Man claims next that the industry attached to ‘digging in the ground for new foundations’, new beginnings, ultimately does not answer the questions: these are left ‘suspended’. As we have seen in the reading of Alastor, suspension is a figure used readily in Shelley’s poetry and it is made to function differently at different times. The question de Man asks, then, though he doesn’t formulate it as a question, is by what system do the interrogatives link with, on the one hand, questions about temporality and epistemology (knowledge), and, on the other, questions about shape and figure (ontology). This is a legitimate concern, one that Shelley himself depicts in two figures of suspension found in the Alastor poem: one that has the poet suspended gazing until ‘meaning on his vacant mind/Flashed like strong inspiration’; and the second when ‘His inmost sense suspended in its web/Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.’101 In posing these questions, says de Man, we are therefore assuming that what we are dealing with, whether it be the poem The Triumph of Life, or the period term Romanticism, is a part or fragment of something larger. And the two figures of suspension in the Alastor poem assume precisely that. This is not lost on de Man, close reader as he is; moreover, posing the problem in this way sets off more questions: ‘What relationship do we have to such a text that allows us to call it a fragment that we are then entitled to reconstruct, to identify, and implicitly to complete?’ and ‘Is the status of a text like the status of a statue?’102 These are the research questions he sets up, but the asking of these questions also predetermines the reading. The first question asks about a relation to a fragment of a larger entity which allows for reconstruction; it also implies a relation to the fragment that can be deconstructed, ‘broken into pieces,

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mutilated or allegorised’; the second question asks about the ontological status of texts as opposed to statues and invokes Yeats’s poem The Statues which carries the image of ‘Live lips on a plummet-measured face’. Is it legitimate to approach texts as though they were statues? But after setting up these problematic questions, de Man’s strategy is, like Shelley’s, to discard them and start again. Rousseau is a key figure in the poem, so his configuration is important in working out relationships between the poet, Shelley, and Rousseau and his ancestors. The poem itself has a history which configures these relations differently, and strong metaphors of history can influence the critic’s relation to the poem, which will fix critical debates in one area. So, for example, when Donald Reiman reads the relation of Rousseau and Voltaire to their own history and to the present of the poet Shelley, through the Wordsworthian metaphor ‘the child is father of the man’, he puts in play a metaphor of history which then becomes the context for debate over whether the poem depicts development or decay. The metaphor itself sets up particular conditions for the act of reading: it implies that there can be a ‘recuperation of a failing energy by means of an increased awareness’.103 What de Man fastens on in the poem is the relationship between the poet and Rousseau in the main narrative, and he finds that the structure of the text is not one of question and answer, but ‘of a question whose meaning is effaced from the moment it is asked’104 and initiates more questioning, and thus puts in process an effacement of meaning, a forgetting and a receding away from the original question. This is a different model of history, then, from the progressive or regressive linear model instantiated by Reiman through Wordsworth and it is also not dialectical. In fact, in this model meaning is frozen: ‘[w]henever this self-receding scene occurs, the syntax and the imagery tie themselves in a knot which arrests the process of understanding’.105 These moments of interruption and seizure in Shelley’s text halt cognition of the narrative, the result of which is riddling and forgetfulness. The passage that de Man turns to in exemplifying this event is Rousseau’s encounter with the ‘shape all light’ which leaves him ‘as one between desire and shame/Suspended …’ and inspires the question, ‘Show whence I came, and where I am and why---’. When he rises at her command and drinks from the cup she offers, his ‘brain became as sand’. What follows is a process of half imprinting (a deer track), half erasure, a stamping (the fierce wolf) and then full erasure in the burst of a new vision ‘never seen before’.106 This sequence marks, for de Man, ‘the metamorphosis of Rousseau into his present state or shape’ which the poet experienced, on first encounter, as a distorted root growing out of the hill side.107 Rousseau, like Edmond Willowes in Hardy’s story is without eyes and disfigured and this, for de Man, marks out a trajectory in the poem from ‘erased self-knowledge to disfiguration’. What is most important here is that de Man reads this scene of the brain becoming sand and subsequent imprinting, not as symbolic of sterility as some critics suggest, but as an allegorical performance: ‘[m]y brain became as sand’ suggests the modification of a knowledge into the surface on which this knowledge ought to be recorded. Ought to be, for instead of being clearly imprinted it is ‘more than half erased’.108 As de Man points out, being a close reader of Rousseau, Shelley would have been



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aware of the two different registers that characterise his work, one introspective and full of pathos, the other more forthright or ‘violent’ and concerned with political power.109 This contrast, which is one that exists in the thematics and structure of Rousseau’s own writings, is a contrast between ‘the power of words as acts and their power to produce other words’. Rousseau’s story, which includes the power of words to act (violence) and the immediate loss of such power (grief), is given as ‘forgetting’; and de Man reads this in tropes of covering and of oblivion, the evasiveness of meaning in images of glimmering, hovering and wavering and the ‘disappearance of shape into shapelessness’. Positing power, however, does not reside with Rousseau, but with the shape, which is ‘the figure of the figurality of all signification’.110 This is the source of forgetting, the materiality of the letter that perpetually acts upon and disfigures phenomenality and perpetually requires the reinscription of this disfiguration. Monumentalisation is therefore a defence mechanism, but one that does not necessarily have to be a credulous act of avoidance, but one that, as demonstrated in de Man’s reading of Shelley’s reading of Rousseau in The Triumph of Life, allegorises this negative knowledge which is exemplified in the performance of reading itself: … to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat – that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have face and a voice that tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophise them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words. What would be naive is to believe that this strategy, which is not our strategy as subjects, since we are its product rather than its agent, can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly.111

In this reading of Shelley, de Man overturns Benjamin’s view of allegory as ‘the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape’ where ‘[e]verything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head’ and something that ‘gives rise to not only the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual’.112 What de Man replaces this with is not the sought after ‘symbolic freedom of expression’ which might redeem history, but the repeated activity of reading where understanding, knowing and forgetting accompany the figurative performance of giving face, erasing and defacing which gives a voice to an ‘allegory of demise’ but also produces us as subjects. Gone is every last intimation that Shelley might somehow ‘rule over allegory’. The best he can do is allegorise ‘his own negative assurance’.113

5

Conclusions: Criticism as Enlightened Deconstruction

Thinking requires both the principle of reason and what is beyond the principle of reason, the arche and an-archy […] Beware of the abysses and the gorges, but also of the bridges and the barriers. Beware of what opens the university to the outside and the bottomless, but also of what, closing in on itself, would create only an illusion of closure, would make the university available to any sort of interest, or else render it perfectly useless.1 This book has presented three versions of allegory in the modern context, and three different configurations of time and history. For Benjamin, allegory names the violence of technē, from the inscription typical of hieroglyphics to signification to the transformative power of modern technology as exemplified in cinematography, all of which have the power to ‘other’, to allegorically change the mode of human perception, the human sensorium itself. Modernity consists of a gradual recognition of the performativity of graphing as it is internalised in the extreme conditions of alienation produced by modern technology, where death in the world of the senses becomes the death of the senses in the world. For de Man allegory is an ongoing condition of existence, an othering implicit in the complex, necessary and impossible task of translating the phenomenality of interiority into the materiality of representation. No amount of philosophising can transcend or overcome that basic rupture in human being: this recognition of a void puts literature in the forefront of knowledge because its very existence as rhetoric requires repetition, precludes relaxation into self-satisfied permanence if it would continue to exist. On this model modernity can be defined as the temptation of permanence, which literature rises up in battle against with ever greater fervour, only then to fall back into forgetfulness. Shelley’s work, which stands on the threshold of capitalist modernity, exemplifies the move between these two positions, one that presupposes a replete world which has become internally corrupted and in need of shock therapy, or catastrophic destruction, to return it to an originating divine balance, and the other which is utterly devoid of a prelapsarian unity that would guarantee an aufhebung outside or beyond the division in being, and the inevitability of decay, which allegory names. In this case modernity is a precarious threshold between two modes of being: one characterised by continual spiritual renewal in the midst of transience, death and decay and the other hell incarnate in which the spiritual

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has itself succumbed to decay. Clearly, allegory has power; it can also engender hope in a secularised and progressively reifying world. Shelley’s use of allegory has indicated as much. And its power is not linked to any particular ideology, in fact allegories are the most faithless of acts and can engender Kafkaesque monsters in the realm of politics, fascism being just one possible result. Benjamin’s thinking produces this insight. Allegory is potentially pernicious as well as destructive, but as the condition of signification itself, we can’t do without it: all reading is allegorical and aesthetics cannot sublimely rise above rhetorical foundations. This much we learn from de Man. The political complications that this fracturing and fragmenting of reality which allegory both participates in and artificially resolves can be understood by way of example: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the longest silent film ever produced, was edited frequently after its premiere in 1927, and over the course of the turbulent years that followed bits of it were lost. Several reproductions have since been made, the last one in 2010, but the film is still incomplete. Ostensibly a dystopian allegory about the relationship between workers and owners under capitalism, the film is set in a futuristic purpose-built city, hierarchically divided between the lower world of the workers and the upper world of the privileged management. The versions differ, the last one appears overtly anti-Semitic in its use of images, but there is no way of telling how the still-missing cuts might have altered readings of the film. Goebbels is known to have contacted Lang and offered him the post of official film-maker for the Nazis, even despite his half-Jewish descent. Lang’s own version of the event has him leave the country immediately on hearing this proposal, though external evidence appears to give the lie to that rendition. Questions arise as to how the film’s various versions can be read and to what political effect. Wolin’s rationalist critical approach has been shown to be insufficient for isolating absolutely those ‘reckless’ thinkers from the rest of the flock. What I want to suggest in this conclusion is that the way forward could be a joint effort between rational rigour and acts of allegorical reading combined, a truce and critical coalition between rational and allegorical approaches, a task that can be achieved by combining Jurgen Habermas’s view of modernity as an ‘unfinished project’ with Paul de Man’s view of it as a concept at odds with history. A similar rapprochement of seemingly mutually exclusive positions finds a precedent in the relatively recent link between Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida who had been critical contenders up until the first decade of the twenty-first century. Habermas, representing the so-called German neo-Kantian critical gesture, has maintained a commitment to an intersubjective and speculative understanding of theoretical and practical reason underpinning a normative horizon of expectation for thought/action: he has rigidly maintained that the failures of the Enlightenment paradigm can be readdressed from the perspective of, not subject-centred rationality, but post-subjective communicative action and rationality. This return to an ethos of truth, reason and freedom stems from his belief that the project of modernity remains unfinished and in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Habermas, in a lengthy essay on Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ construes his thought as neo-conservative, postNietzschean Jewish mysticism.2 Derrida, on the other hand, representing the so-called French radicalised phenomenological critical position, opposes this repositioning of

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reason by introducing the problems of difference, aporia, singularity and event and refutes the proposition that the movement between the opposition common and singular can be gathered together dialectically without violence. Equally, the realm of communicative action that Habermas seeks to theorise is doubly problematical because of ‘techno-economic mutation of the media’ (such as radio) which are not a ‘reflection’ of public opinion.3 Despite these fundamental philosophical differences, since 9/11 Habermas and Derrida have been brought together in several textual events (a juxtaposition, but also an attempted meeting of spirits) on the question of international politics. The essay ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, begins with the assertion that [i]t is the wish of Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas to be co-signatories of what is both an analysis and an appeal. They regard it as necessary and urgent that French and German philosophers lift their voices together, whatever disagreements may have separated them in the past.4

Thus it would seem that there is some precedent for an interlocution between the claims of critical theory and those of deconstruction: putting Habermas next to de Man need not therefore be absolute anathema. Habermas is a social theorist and a philosopher and is concerned with theorising the intersubjective conditions that would facilitate a public sphere capable of continuing the Enlightenment project; as has been shown, de Man is a literary critic concerned primarily with pitting signification against the inescapable forces of institutionalisation upon which the concept of modernity rests. Habermas’s primary concern is to theorise a unifying context for communicative action; de Man’s main concern is to contextualise resistances to the monumentalising unity and the universality of theory. Habermas explicitly eschews the kind of postmetaphysical thinking that dismisses a lifeworld background which would make possible a public sphere of communicative action; de Man scrupulously analyses – especially in his later work – how literariness, ‘the use of language that foregrounds the rhetorical over the grammatical and logical function’ i.e. allegory, persistently disrupts the inner balance of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and its articulation with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music).5 This dissimilarity between Habermasian critical theory and de Manian criticolinguistics can, in fact, be reduced to a single difference: that of defining what philosophy is and should aspire towards. This difference prevents any productive synthesis of the two. But my claim here is that the debate over the value of one perspective over another, and the investment that thinkers have put in maintaining the mutual exclusivity of the two approaches, has thus far precluded a potentially useful critical engagement between them on the question of modernity. For Habermas the project of modernity – that is, the pursuit of progressive intersubjective action that leads to a maturity of thought in the linking of the One with the Many – is still unfinished, and the linguistic turn in philosophy, pace Derrida’s reading of Saussure and others, has not rendered the project redundant, but provided the opportunity for rethinking communicative action. By contrast, for de Man, the term ‘modernity’

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papers over the inescapable aporia that exists between two orders – the phenomenal and the material – that are so different in kind as to prohibit any synthesising dialectic. Whereas Habermas reformulates the Marxist notion of praxis – understood as political, economic or ethical action instigated through the union of subjective and objective realms – by distinguishing between what Marx understood as ‘work’ or ‘purposive rational action’ and what he himself understands as ‘interaction’ or communicative action, de Man couples ‘theoria’ with ‘aesthesia’ in order to reveal the source of the problem of praxis. And whereas Habermas restricts his speculations to the discourse of philosophy, de Man works with writers/thinkers that straddle the two domains of philosophy and literature. Finally, whereas for Habermas aesthetic discourse, which reaches its apex with romanticism – represents a strong counter-discourse within the philosophical discourse of modernity, for de Man, the institutional framework in which the work of the so-called ‘romantic’ writing is housed, precludes its functioning as the radical counter-discourse that it strives to be. Habermas reads a clear distinction between aesthetic discourse and the philosophical discourse of modernity: in aesthetic discourse, before the rise of philosophical aesthetics, the problem of the ‘modern’ emerges with the problem of conceptualising the ‘new’, rather than configuring subjectivity. By way of example, in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books6 memorialised in a fictional context what would emerge in the eighteenth century as the querelle des anciens et des modernes which represented the struggle between two different world views brought on by the advance of modern natural science. In this context what becomes an issue is the new ethos, rather than the logical grounding so important to the epistemologists. Swift’s Battle threw into focus the character of the ‘Moderns’, their Enlightenment emphasis on individuation, progress and reason in contrast to the Ancients orientation toward scholarship: the Ancients – described as bee-like in their productivity and endowed with studiousness, range, and judgement – declare war on the Moderns – who are spider-like in their laziness, contemplative and proud, entirely self-nurturing and scorning any obligation to outside influences. The war constitutes a theoretical, aesthetic and linguistic impasse: action is anything but dialogic. The dramatic outcome (the Ancients arise supreme in eradicating the Moderns) radicalises the importance of the Ancients found in the work of men such as John of Salisbury and Michel Montaigne, for whom the Moderns were like dwarfs, standing on the shoulders of the earlier Ancient giants, products of earlier accomplishments rather than examples of personal and independent achievement. In focusing on the temporal element in art history and philosophical history, eighteenth-century French philosophie de l’histoire circumnavigated the problem of the mutual exclusivity of the standards of perfection represented by the Anciens and Modernes.7 Thus the French Enlightenment represents an ‘epochal turning point’ where singular history wins out and emerges as a new beginning, a new grounding, a new ‘self understanding’ as the meaning of classical imitation is critiqued and a new aesthetic is posed, conjoining, following the model of modern natural science, the notion of perfection with that of progress. Later eighteenth-century German philosophical aesthetics carries this theme forward in overturning the pre-eminence of reason over the imagination.

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The philosophical discourse of modernity, on the other hand, can be thought to begin with Descartes’ cogito and the formulation of the ground for the rise of the modern sovereign rational subject. Jacques Derrida describes this event as an internal modification in the history of Western metaphysics in line with the determination of being as presence and the final reduction of the trace which continues through Rousseau, Kant and the Enlightenment philosophers arising again with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and structuralism.8 The philosophical discourse of modernity turns on this rise of the sovereign subject, rational and moral and, after Kant, governed by a priori categories. The concept is preserved in the eighteenth century with the removal of rhetoric from the classical trivium: aesthetics then achieves autonomy with ‘disinterestedness’ as it is distanced from the immediate concerns of logos and ethos. This allows for the individuation of the dual domains of mind/body, reason/unreason, philosophy/literature imbedded in a value hierarchy where the philosophical, the rational, and the spiritual are prioritised over the literary, irrational and material. In this the important cognitive function of the literary is suborned to the theorising interests of philosophy. But the rise of aesthetics in the eighteenth century also provides the opportunity for a counter-enlightenment discourse to develop: from Schiller and the romantics to Nietzsche, Marx, the left Hegelians, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, Derrida and those poststructuralists that follow a new counter-discourse develops directed toward the ‘desublimation and de-centring’ of the sovereign rational subject. This new discourse affirms the values of contingency, conventionality, plurality of worlds, heterogeneity, semiotic systems lacking foundations, the economy of desire, and the historical and cultural character of categories of thought and structures of action. Modernity thus comes to designate both the discourse of reason and a radicalising counter discourse. From this perspective, romanticism, modernism and postmodernism can be viewed as aesthetic categories that participate in, but cannot be reduced to, the philosophical discourse of modernity. All of this is distinguished from the process of modernisation which is rationalisation through technology and the development of bureaucratic state apparatus’s operating in conjunction with capitalism. Now Habermas and de Man enter the counter discourse of modernity, or what Habermas calls ‘postmetaphysical thinking’, from very different angles: de Man’s interest in the late part of his career is with the technical aspects of ‘critico-linguistics’, while Habermas’s late linguistic turn takes the form of wrestling a lifeworld and a domain of communicative action from the process of rationalisation. This difference is of course crucial, because de Man’s linguistic turn exacerbates his earlier phenomenological insights in not merely fracturing understanding, but, in Benjaminian fashion, exploding it; Habermas’s turn, on the other hand, opens up new vistas for understanding. After Knowledge and Human Interests, in fact, Habermas’s linguistic turn necessarily includes the embracing of certain truths about language that are already assumed by de Man in his early writings of the 50s and 60s. Habermas clearly admires de Man’s early work, though this respect is not matched by a closeness to it, for he gets it wrong when he groups de Man in with critics who he describes as ‘levelling … the genre distinction between literary criticism and literature’.9 In actual

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fact the incisiveness of de Man’s thinking depends upon a clear, albeit temporary, circumscription of generic, categorial and cognitive domains. Nevertheless, de Man and Habermas can be thought to enter the debate with significant points of contact in their thinking, that is in the area of methodology, in the importance attributed to romanticism, in the centrality of their respective critiques of Hegel and Nietzsche. After Habermas wrote Knowledge and Human Interests he realised immediately that the Kantian notion of self-reflection was ambivalent – that the distinction between self-reflection as the grasp of the necessary and universal underpinning conditions for theoretical knowledge, practical reason and teleological and aesthetic judgement and the freedom-oriented, emancipatory sense of self reflection was not made clear. In Theory of Communicative Action he redresses this oversight by preserving the Kantian programme of transcendental philosophy, but without a foundation in a priori concepts. In other words, in making his own inquiry scientific he proceeded on the basis of empirical testing of hypotheses. So, to his earlier category of empirical/analytical sciences (such as the natural whose interests were technical and were served by instrumental reason) he added the reconstructive sciences, whose aims are to provide explicit theoretical knowledge of implicit ‘pre-theoretical’ knowledge; in other words, rather than being a form of transcendental philosophy, reconstructive sciences seek to make explicit ‘universal species competences’ in the context of empirical research verified by canons of truth and falsehood. But reconstructive sciences differ from empirical sciences in that, rather than seeking to ‘replace’ ‘pre-theoretical’ knowledge with a more adequate scientific explanation of the world, they explain and clarify the basic grammar of our ‘pre-theoretical knowledge’. Now the theory of communicative action and rationality (also called Universal Pragmatics because it seeks to isolate, identify and clarify conditions required for human communication and because, for Habermas, all human symbolic competence presupposes the universal species competence of communication) is a ‘reconstructive science’ but it differs from the others in that it has a more ‘universalist thrust’. It is precisely that reconstructive science which enables us to specify the contributions and limitations of reconstructive sciences that have more restricted domains. De Man’s critical methodology also eschews Kantian a priori imperatives: his work consistently seeks to provide explicit theoretical knowledge (knowing that) from implicit pre-theoretical knowledge (knowing how). Unlike the social sciences, however, what is at stake for de Man is precisely the ‘transcendental’ status of theoretical knowledge on literature. Theory in the area of literary studies is ‘a controlled reflection on the formation of method’ which uncovers a tension, or a resistance, between truth and method, or scholarship and theory. Literary language cannot be contained by the ‘Cratylism of the name’ since the phenomenality of the signifier (where sound links the thing named and the name) is reduced to the materiality of convention in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. He calls this ‘non-phenomenal linguistics’ and views it as a way of freeing the discourse on literature from uncritical aesthetic and mimetic (and its counterpart pure verbalist) conceptions of art. Although he recognises that this view of language is epistemologically unreliable; nevertheless, as he says:

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[i]n a genuine semiology as well as in other linguistically oriented theories, the referential function of language is not being denied – far from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for natural or phenomenal cognition. Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge ‘reality’, but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language.10

He drives this point home when he says that: No one in his right mind would try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day’ but it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future existence in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world.11

The ‘linguistics of literariness’ is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, in blindly ignoring the difference between linguistics and natural reality, or the difference between the referential function of language and phenomenalism, it participates in both the production of, and unmasking of, ‘ideological aberrations’. Built into the very question of literary theory, then, is the notion of ‘resistance’, defined as the ‘resistance to the use of language about language’.12 Hegel and Nietzsche function importantly for both de Man and Habermas: Habermas sees Hegel as having inaugurated the discourse of modernity, and the first philosopher to view modernity as an epochal concept. Hegel viewed the problem of modernity as couched in the constellation of modernity, time-consciousness, and rationality: elevating Spirit to the Absolute obviated the conditions under which it achieved itself and this made modernity conscious to itself. In this Kant’s third antinomy of causality becomes a dialectic of freedom and determination. Phenomenology of Mind tackles the problem of appearances by claiming that we can only know Reality when we have completely mastered appearances. Appearances (material and mental phenomena) both hide and reveal Reality (noumena, Geist, spirit, mind) – the history of human consciousness consists of appearances, images and illusions as consciousness itself moves through various stages and levels of development on its way toward Absolute Truth. Hegel, as Habermas points out, was the first to think ‘modernity’ as a resistance to both the religion of reason and religious Orthodoxy: both forms were guilty of what he called ‘Positivitat’13, 14, or the authoritarian linking of the two worlds of finite and infinite by faith rather than reason. As Habermas says: ‘Positive’ applies to prescriptions according to which the faithful are supposed to earn God’s benevolence through works instead of moral action; to the hope for compensation in the beyond; to the divorce of a doctrine in the hands of a few from the life and possession of all; to the detachment of priestly knowledge from the fetishised belief of the masses, as well as to the detour that supposedly leads to morality only by way of the authority and miraculous deeds of one person; to all

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the assurances and threats aimed at the sheer legality of action; finally and above all, the separation of private religion from public life.15

The Enlightenment had mistakenly raised understanding (Verstand) which is finite, to the level of the Absolute. This idolatry of Reason – achieved only by sublating the understanding to the status of Reason itself, which inevitably leads to a relapse when the activity of Reason is fixed in opposition – pretentiously and groundlessly assumes rationality. Both the religion of reason and Orthodoxy used biblical exegesis as a means of critically founding their independent directions. The religion of reason, the felicity of which depends on the condition of subjective freedom, only reinforces modernity’s diremptive condition rather than, as Hegel would have it, ‘shaping religion into the ethical totality of an entire nation and of inspiring a life of political freedom’.16 But Hegel’s thinking, as Habermas indicates, is recuperated precisely by the thinking it critiques: Hegel makes the finite understanding posit the infinite as absolute even before it is demonstrated that ‘a kind of reason which is more than an absolutised understanding can convincingly reunify the antithesis that reason has to unfold discursively’.17 With Nietzsche, subject-centred reason is submitted to an immanent critique and he gives up the dialectic of the Enlightenment. By following ‘the road not taken’ by Nietzsche and subsequent poststructuralists, Habermas seeks to transpose the dialectic of consciousness into that of intersubjectivity. This entails both a recognition that operates reciprocally and non-coercively, and is directed toward mutual understanding. The totality of ethical life becomes paramount here: unification and reconciliation are based on rational agreement conducted in the everyday lifeworld through communicative action. The de-centred subject participates, through the medium of language, where the relation between meaning and validity claims is both conditioned and continually revised, but ultimately directed beyond local contexts. Validity serves as the foundation of an existing consensus. Hence the foundation of ‘discourse ethics’ is in the universalisation of moral norms and the development of ethical personal identities. But all of this is dependent upon a clear distinction between the structural intentions of philosophical and literary discourses. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas describes two versions of the ‘posthistoire’ that he claims arise after the discursive shift that occurs when socialscientific functionalism supersedes Weberian classical sociology. Whereas the earlier tradition focuses on modernity as both cultural secularisation and the institutionalisation of the dual systems of purposive rationality taking shape around capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus emerging in the wake of Christianity, the latter concentrates on the cumulative and mutually reinforcing processes of modernisation such as the formation and development of capital, centralisation of political power and the rise of national identities, formal schooling, voting rights etc. The effect of this discursive shift is to abstract modernity from its situated historicity – that is as a phenomenon peculiar to the European Occident – thus making modernisation the theory of evolutionary development with universal application. What gets lost in this is ‘the historical objectification of rational structures’, the internal linkage ‘between modernity and the historical context of Western rationalism, in other words,

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‘the conceptual horizon of Western rationalism’.18 On this abandonment of the historically situated condition of modernity, two post-Enlightenment discourses arise, one neoconservative the other anarchistic. The neoconservative discourse of the posthistoire accepts the crystallised and unswayable functional societal structures established by modernity, but renders cultural modernity in itself obsolete as the processes of modernisation accelerate; the anarchistic discourse, on the other hand, rejects the validity of both societal modernity and cultural modernity, unmasking reason as the will to instrumental mastery which becomes objectified in the so-called ‘iron cage’ of societal modernity, and when exposed is dispelled as ‘primordial anarchism’ takes over. Although de Man also eschews the paradigm of consciousness, he is from the beginning sceptical about getting beyond Hegel. He sees Hegelianism in all historicising strategies, whether they are organic or genetic. In ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’ de Man declares that ‘[w]hether we know it, or like it, or not, most of us are Hegelians and quite orthodox ones at that’.19 He indicates the investment literary practitioners have in equating aesthetics with poetics, or literary experience with literary theory, which he interprets in Hegelian terms as the equating of art with the symbolic. Hegel’s Aesthetics stands out as the key text that both appears to theorise the accomplishment of this equation; on the other hand, the text asserts this ‘concrete interpenetration of meaning and of form’ at the very moment that he declares the end of art. De Man points to the irony of a literary history that would finish art ‘at the very moment that a new modernity was about to discover and to refine the power of the symbol beyond anything that Hegel’s somewhat philistine taste could ever have imagined?’20 Aesthetic theory that follows grapples with this complication in Hegel, only to dismiss him as naive or useless for understanding the art and literature that follows him. But de Man reads in this peculiar irony a far more complicated condition. From de Man’s perspective, Hegel’s philosophy, like all philosophies that strive to contain the experiential in theories of history, is an ‘allegory of the disjunction between philosophy and history, between literature and the aesthetic … between literary experience and literary theory’.21 De Man is also extremely sceptical about the possibility of disentangling literary from philosophical discourse, though he is always careful to respect the so-called intentional structure of all texts. He is wary indeed of the possibility of an aesthetic critique of philosophy. In the essays collected in Allegories of Reading in particular, he shows how every text can be given two antithetical, mutually contradictory readings and how it is often impossible to prioritise one over the other based on some notion of intentional structure. This impossibility is further exacerbated at every moment in the reading of a text as the figural and the literal are always inescapably present. The choice of one or the other at every moment radically influences the production of meaning. Reading can only be viewed, therefore, as an allegory, every one inevitably made redundant on every subsequent repetition of the process. This insight is carried forward in his late work when he reads philosophical texts. In the essays on Locke, Kant, Pascal, Hegel and Schiller, he shows how propositional structures inevitably struggle with figuration and how the movement of philosophical

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texts is determined by the necessary but impossible task of controlling figuration. Ultimately, this control is facilitated by using figures to mask or paper over aporias or contradictions in the argument. Under these conditions theorising discourses (in particular aesthetics) lose their critical functions and begin to collaborate with any regime of knowledge. Theory is thus never fully successful in achieving the status of critique: it is inevitably made complicit with ideology. As mentioned in Chapter three, some romantic critics have referred to de Man’s stance as ‘de Manian Nietzscheanism’ and see it as pernicious not so much because it is pluralist – many critics were happy to read many voices in the operation of romantic texts – but because it annihilated the vocabulary upon which the historical notion of self-fashioning could claim to exist. These critics were happy to concede to a pluralism of perfected liberal democracy – ‘the end of history’ in Francis Fukayama’s22 sense – but they were unwilling to read romantic writers as the first ‘modern’ writers to perceive the ‘nothingness of being’. Ironically, then, in this critique of de Manianism where what becomes the most important issue is how the reading of these romantic writers will be institutionalised, de Man’s strongest insight is confirmed. Habermas himself has been accused of a certain short-sightedness in his Universal Pragmatics. Edward Said points out that for all his talk about ‘discourse ethics’ he does not address racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance or oppositional practice in the empire. And on this charge Habermas admits to Eurocentrism, saying that he has nothing to say about ‘anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist’ struggles in the Third World. De Man’s thinking, on the other hand, is oriented toward resistance, the inevitability of resistance to theory. It is precisely resistance that de Man reads in romantic aesthetics, a ‘paradoxical dialectic’ that is eliminated in the institutionalisation of the term ‘romanticism’. In The Meaning of Literature, Timothy Weiss makes the claim that all of literature itself is a romantic institution. By this he means that the terms that serve to circumscribe canons – genius, image, symbol – all take their bearings from eighteenth-century debates. De Man was early to point this out: but he also noted how the modern was understood in relation to the institutionalised romantic Anglo-American criticism of the early 1960s. Earl Wasserman and M. H. Abrams, for example, viewed a pre-romantic aesthetic as having failed because it was painfully impotent, unable to move beyond analogy to ‘internalise the external and integrate the spiritual and the phenomenal’. Moreover, the romantics were seen as able to participate in history making – in true Hegelian fashion – insofar as they succeed in overcoming the crisis of poetic failure of their pre-romantic predecessors, and hence move aesthetics on to a more totalising plane of epistemology. In this the romantic period is seen as characterised by romantic writers who self-consciously address (and indeed solve) the problem of ‘healing’ the mind/body dualism that opens with Descartes. What is overcome in this periodising, historicising strategy, then, is a very anti-historical enlightenment logic in which the struggle between ‘reason’ and ‘unreason’ is consciously resolved with reason, via the imagination, winning out. For de Man this monumentalising technique depends on the conflation of the phenomenal with the material. It has a counterpart in the work of Georg Lukács where

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changing modes of production are posited, rather than consciousness, as the means by which reason necessarily works through history. As Lukács puts it, the reasonableness of human progress develops ever-increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself … history itself is the bearer and realiser of human progress.23

In the first instance, progress amounts to the objectification of rational structures, where the polarities rational/irrational, analytical/existential, consciousness/faith underwrite the differences between philosophy and literature, and where literature is cancelled out with the predominance of philosophy. In the second instance these binarisms invite a synthesis, the form of which is determined nevertheless by philosophy: the narrative of this synthesis consists of the aggregate of historical periods. But conflating the philosophical and the literary – as these techniques do – eliminates or distorts the problem of history, reducing it to an antithesis between ‘positions of extreme positivism or equally extreme subjective primitivism’.24 Both of these positions make the concept of modernity merely the process of modernisation, an evolutionary process the effect of which is not only to contribute to the discourse of ‘postmodernity’ (after modernisation, posthistoire), but also, more importantly as Habermas notes, it dissociates ‘modernity’ from its modern European origins and stylise(s) it into a spatio-temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general. Furthermore, it breaks the internal connections between modernity and the historical context of Western rationalism, so that processes of modernisation can no longer be conceived of as rationalisation, as the historical objectification of rational structures.25

De Man too rejects what he calls the ‘misconceived’ formulation of modernism, which posits absolute changes that nevertheless accrue in evolutionary terms as progress. This understanding of modernism leads to ways of reading in which early works are overcome at a higher level in later works. This happens with critical evaluations of Lukács’s work, for example: often (especially in the American context) his works are divided into pre- and post-Marxist phases whereby the early pre-Marxist period is simplistically rejected, mainly for political reasons. In these cases the theoretical/ political interest motivates methodological procedures. By contrast, de Man reads continuity in his oeuvre, which must be understood in terms of philosophical strengths and weaknesses in relation to the nineteenth and twentieth century intellectual heritage of European romanticism and idealism.26 This philosophical context constitutes for de Man what Habermas calls the ‘conceptual horizon of Western rationalism in which modernity arose’.27 Habermas, like de Man, is not concerned with evaluating modernism as an aesthetic affect as is Lukács in some of his work. In aestheticising modernism, Lukács reads it as psychopathology, a wholesale and summary rejection of reality which is purely subjective and lacking both content and direction. Like Freud’s psychoanalysis, it is an empty gesture: it expresses nausea, longing or discomfort. It represents an ideological problem related to the dogma of

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the solitariness of man, to the glorification of the abnormal and to an undisguised anti-humanism. The portrayal of reality, in other words, is distorted and distortion becomes an inseparable part of the portrayal of reality. Interestingly, this dichotomy between modernism and realism both links Lukács’s thinking with Habermas’s, and severs it definitively from de Man’s. De Man’s reading of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, for example, subordinates the content of his argument (the story-stuff, or what Victor Sklovskij called ‘motivation’ – ‘the elements comprising the material it uses’28) to the terminological, rhetorical, systemic and perspectival elements of its construction. Generally, these include ‘a pre-Hegelian terminology, but a post Nietzschean rhetoric, with a deliberate tendency to substitute general and abstract systems for concrete examples’ and the perspective of ‘a mind that claims to have reached such an advanced degree of generality that it can speak, as it were, for the novelistic consciousness itself ’.29 These elements of construction are caught in an interaction which rests precisely on the relationship between philosophy and literature. De Man draws a chiasmic philosophical/literary comparison between Lukács and Hegel: on the one hand, the philosophical and literary conjoin at the level of fabula as Lukács’s novel and Hegel’s Spirit relate the histories of their own respective journeys. However, this conflation of the literary and the philosophical is overturned at the level of sjuzet as Hegel’s Spirit acquires unquestionable authority in attaining ‘a full understanding of its own being’, while Lukács’s novelistic consciousness is never so certain: ‘[b]eing caught in its own contingency, it remains a mere phenomenon without regulative power’.30 The value of Lukács’s thinking is in not succumbing so easily to what de Man calls the ‘urge for totality’: his theory of the novel retains the dual themes of estranged reality and the totality of inwardness, articulating them structurally as irony. De Man seizes on how irony as a structural category conflicts with, but is nevertheless made to represent the imitation of reality. Although Lukács registers the dangers of ‘inwardness for its own sake’ – since parts and wholes are brought together conceptually rather than organically, in an ‘ever-suspended’ relationship – he does not develop a ‘genuine hermeneutic of the novel’. In fact he does quite the opposite, which is to reject out of hand a hermeneutic theory of language based on inwardness (such, as for example, phenomenology which pits a right-wing epistemology against a left-wing ethics). Nevertheless, as de Man points out, Lukács’s rejection of all aspects of organicism is not consistent: if homogeneous unity is impossible at the level of inwardness, it is recovered in time conceived as a unifying durée capable of reconciling ironic discontinuities. Thus Lukács’s earlier advance on Hegel is clawed back as this theory of time, which is also a theory of history, is conceived of at the level of fabula: all of the structural complexities apparent at the level of sjuzet when the issue was the question of the modern self, become reified to the very extent that tense structures are ignored as temporality is reduced to a simple flow. Consequently, it is in the early Lukács that the ‘urge for totality’ – which in Lukács’s case will become his theory of realism – can first be discerned. What this analysis misses is, again, a very ‘paradoxical dialectic’ found in romantic poetics in which the qualitatively different realms of the phenomenal and the

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material are brought together in a so-called synthesis. This happens with historical discourses which generalise by articulating together entirely incompatible entities such as ‘modern’ and ‘literature’: a notion of historical time as a single, coherent, causal and evolutionary process moving progressively from one stage to another is combined with existential time understood as a form of spontaneity.31 This spontaneous existential time is cancelled or contradicted in different ways, but never capable of being drawn into synthetic union with the forms of its representation in literature, or by such forms of historical representation as would seek to understand it as part of a process of developing spirit based on the trope of reflection or, on the other hand, as an unfolding of a history of ideas. For de Man, these devices create the illusion of a parasitic relationship between theory and practice (an inevitable and unavoidable error). Because the character of modernity is complicated by the diverse means and manners of representation, any conceptual definition will necessarily negate the concept, not in a Hegelian sense where there is a negation of negation that still somehow leaves you in the conceptual realm, or as a negative dialectic in Adorno’s sense. This sort of negation is paradoxical, the self-contradiction of the concept, or ‘the manner in which it discovers the impossibility of being modern’.32 This discovery occurs as a consequence of the structure of the concept: its temporality makes the process of referring it to a fixed single linguistic event very difficult. De Man turns to Nietzsche in order to analyse what happens when, as he says, ‘a genuine impulse toward modernity collides with the demands of a historical consciousness or a culture based on the disciplines of history’. Nietzsche’s text ‘Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life’ starts precisely by criticising the conjoining of the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘history’ in the German academic discourse of his time, a conjoining that makes modernity a way of describing a state of mind rather than, as it should be, a temporal term linked with ‘life’ and the ability to forget all that precedes the present. Rather than modernity consisting of a culmination and solidification of the past in the present, it is a rejection of the past born out of a desire for pure presence which precipitates a new beginning through an authentic throwing (of oneself) into action: Thus defined, modernity and history are diametrically opposed to each other in Nietzsche’s text. Nor is there any doubt as to his commitment to modernity, the only way to reach the meta-historical realm in which the rhythm of one’s existence coincides with that of the eternal return.33

This radical differentiating of modernity from history is certainly the surface desire of Nietzsche’s text: however, on de Man’s reading, it never really succeeds in disentangling itself from a sense of historical causality. To temporalise modernity as ‘life’ must include the ‘temporal experience of human mutability’, which in Nietzsche’s case is presented as a kind of ‘pessimistic wisdom’, the deeply historical experience of passing that is neither forgettable nor separable from the present. Hence it is that the existential time with which he seeks to cancel or forget history can only operate dialectically on itself: however adamant Nietzsche’s denial of history, ‘the text leads

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him irrevocably’ to the discovery that ‘the rejection of the past is not so much an act of forgetting as a critical judgement directed against himself ’.34 Nietzsche advocates that the student have the strength to indict, condemn and sever himself from the past for its injustices: this act of judgement would certainly be a parricide of sorts, though not the type of sacrificial killing that would engender a totemic sense of community as it does with Freud. Nietzsche’s text advocates disregarding what he calls ‘established pieties’ and the activity of brutally attacking and rooting out the past in order to allow the present to live. The process is one of forgetting and then an active unforgetting which produces the clarity needed for insight into the violence and weakness historically conditioning human affairs. This paradoxical forgetting and unforgetting and the violent destruction of the past is necessary for two reasons: because it is impossible to entirely extricate oneself from the past, and because there is an imperative to create a new past. There is a determinism in Nietzsche’s typically modern gesture insofar as forgetting the past and recreating a past implicates modernism in the motion of history. More than this, modernism becomes the engendering force of history and so part of ‘a generative scheme that extends far back into the past’. In this, history and life cannot be extricated from each other: history depends on modernism’s radical renewal for its continuance, but this dependence puts history in a situation of infinite regression, infinitely conquered by the radical condition of its own renewal. When Nietzsche confronts the paradox of his call for the ‘truly new, powerful, life-giving, and original’, that is that even his own text is part of this regressive historical process, he delegates the responsibility for renewal to ‘youth’ who, like himself, will not be able to achieve a renewal through self-forgetting. For de Man it is this aporetic predicament that constitutes modern modernity: ‘Modernity and history’ he says, ‘seem condemned to being linked together in a self-destroying union that threatens the survival of both.’35 De Man links this analysis of modern modernity with the specificity of literature, which, for him is always modern. Writers of literature – unlike writers of history who remain remote from their object – depend on the past but are always actively engaged with the ‘new’ which destroys anything that interferes with its performativity. However, although literature is possessed with a desire for ‘pure immediacy’, something in the structure of this assertion seems to introduce rhetorical devices that specifically put the possibility of being modern into question. ‘How is it’, de Man asks, that a specific and important feature of a literary consciousness, its desire for modernity, seems to lead outside literature into something that no longer shares this specificity, thus forcing the writer to undermine his own assertions in order to remain faithful to his vocation?36

Although for de Man, literary consciousness is inherently modern insofar as its specificity is constituted through its desire for newness, to embrace the ‘modern’ as a descriptive term (especially in relation to the ancients), not only indicates a lack of literary sensibility on the part of the critic, but carries the critic into a discourse that is not literary: evaluations of modern literature which are detached (as with Fontenelle objective, scientific, historical perfectibilite) or committed (such as

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Perrault’s ‘technological man’) are couched in discourses that ‘lead away from literary understanding’.37 This uncritical fascination with the present seems to be characteristic of most modern writers. Baudelaire’s work, like Nietzsche’s, suppresses memory of anteriority, with imagery that evokes new beginnings, the tabula rasa of pure perceptual immediacy, meanwhile cancelling this pure presence in the mode of its representation. Severing the present from a pernicious and threatening past nevertheless preserves the form of extended time. For de Man, Baudelaire’s description of Constantin Guys, as a man of action and an observer and recorder of events, is a case in point. Baudelaire’s analysis of Guy’s work is characteristic of the so-called modern. The improvisational style is a conscious attempt to repeatedly capture the instantaneous present, to postpone the final closure of the form so as to ‘outrun time, to achieve a swiftness that would transcend the latent opposition between action and form’.38 What is effectively at stake here is the status of the modern as the so-called ability of literature to ‘move outside art’, and to inhabit the present as the absolute facticity of the new. In de Man’s reading, this nostalgia for the present, and equally the ability to forget or repress the knowledge of the ephemeral and phantom character of the self manifests as literature’s nostalgia for a specificity, a specificity which involves it in a movement away from itself, and a second movement that returns it to itself. In other words, what characterises the modern is literature’s insatiable desire to move away from its centre, a desire that inevitably fails: the desire for the purely new of presence inevitably involves a return to itself, but this cannot be understood in a temporal frame. Both the movement away and the return occur simultaneously. As Walter Benjamin says ‘[a] mbiguity is the law of the dialectic brought to a standstill’. Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.39

Habermas’s repost would be that the discourses of ‘posthistoire’ cannot be reduced to aesthetics. In fact, as stated earlier, there are two forms: the first is motivated by this neoconservative, evolutionary, social-scientific, functionalist model of modernisation which posits the so-called ‘dissolution of the internal links between the concept of modernity and the self understanding of modernity gained within the horizon of Western reason’.40, 41 The theoretical problem in this version is that ignoring this conceptual horizon means that research into modernisation is directed toward ‘the husk of self-understanding that appears to be overtaken’ rather than toward the ‘unchecked dynamism of societal modernisation’.42 The second version emerges in the area of aesthetics and conflates the distinctive domains of culture and society: here the distinctiveness of the emergence of Occidental rationalism that Weber first observes is explained away as merely the ‘will to instrumental mastery’. In other words, this version does not make a distinction between the secularisation of Western culture (in which cultural spheres of value – empirical sciences, autonomous arts, theories of morality

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and law – take shape within independent learning processes driven by their respective inner logics) and the development of new structures of society in accordance with the institutionalisation of ‘purposive-rational economic and administrative action’ (the coupling of capitalist enterprise and bureaucratic state apparatuses which operate in tandem).43 For Habermas, the critical force of this exposure of reason as the mere will to power is that it ‘shakes the iron cage in which the spirit of modernity has been objectified in societal form’44; however, such ‘primordial anarchism’, and the mortification of narratives of reason-governed social progress which issue from it, make it logically impossible to attend to actual social progress. In this very useful description of the social-scientific functionalist and philosophical aesthetic ‘postmodernisms’, Habermas clearly distinguishes between two theories of the ‘end of history’ which seemingly work in tandem, blindly ignoring the conceptual horizon within which ‘the self-understanding of European modernity’ has been formed. However, the claim I want to make here is that Habermas too easily conflates the social scientific critique and the philosophical, aesthetic, anarchistic critique together under the rubric ‘postmodern’. De Man’s thinking, for example, which might on a superficial reading be grouped within the ‘primordial anarchism’ of aesthetically driven critiques, has not ignored the conceptual horizon in which the self understanding of European modernity was formed. Indeed, the very significance that he gives to so-called romantic writers is an indication that he takes this conceptual horizon very seriously indeed. In fact, the critique of ‘romanticism’ as an institutionalised historical concept that reacts to rationalisation processes forms a great deal of de Man’s thinking. As his work of the 50s and 60s clearly indicates, reading these writers at the level of procedures, rather than motivation, reveals an alternative agenda to that of reconciling mind and nature, and in Habermas’s terms returning European thought to what he calls a form of traditionalism. This agenda suggests not counterEnlightenment thinking, but a struggle with the character of consciousness itself. This struggle inevitably leads to poetic speculation on the relationship between mind and language, and how the necessities of language thwart the intentions of consciousness as freedom. So both Habermas and de Man single out aesthetic theorising on modernity as a source of much wrong thinking. For Habermas, Baudelaire wrongly fuses aesthetic and historical experience of modernity: the experience of the modern involves the problem of grounding in an acute way. With the breakdown of the realm of everyday life, subjectivity becomes decentred, which changes the horizon of temporal experience, reducing it to the temporal horizon of the decentred subject. Hence the modern work of art occurs at the intersection of the actual and the eternal. This actuality, however, is self-consuming as it can no longer put itself in opposition to history as a shape. In this experience, confirmation is found as the aesthetic past of a future present. Hence the temporality of the modern manifests as a flash – its appearance and its collapse appear simultaneously. And herein is the link between modernity and fashion or mode: the concept of beauty exists in the interface between mode and eternal meaning. It is in this way that the authentic work of art is radically bound to the moment of its emergence. The flash stops the flow of trivialities as the

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eternal and the actual come into conflict – eternal beauty comes about only in the mode of the contemporary. The function of the dandy is to look for modernity, to cause surprise by using the extraordinary to expose the extraordinary, ‘to distil eternal from the transitory’. For de Man modernity is not to be understood as merely an accumulation of background influences, as occurs in conservative versions of literary history. Nor is it simply the will to instrumental mastery, as advocates of the mortification of the grand narrative would have it. The ‘modern’ exists in absolute antithesis to ‘tradition’. As de Man says, the true antithesis is between this theory of history and those modern writers and philosophers who ‘have made human consciousness the centre of their concern and language the medium of their exploration’.45 In other words, the problematics of consciousness and language supersede the possible synthesis of phenomenal and material domains. De Man’s turn to aesthesis refocuses the problem of reality vs. appearances (arguably the organising principle of Western philosophy since Plato), first as the ironic polarity of inner consciousness vs language,46 and then, in his later work, with the polarity of mode vs. meaning in the realm of linguistics. On this reading, dialectic is not prohibited, as it is with the two versions of the posthistoire outlined by Habermas; however, the parameters of its felicity are strictly delimited by sphere. In line with Habermas’s own thinking, de Man reads two different spheres of concern, but rather than these being culture and society, they are those of form and content. Form involves issues such as the ‘how’ of representation: they include intentionality, are pragmatic, assume a subjective freedom; content involves the ‘what’ of representation, is concerned with reference, oriented toward the hermeneutics of understanding. Although the problematics of representation involve the overlapping of spheres of form and content, they do so independently: form and content are not antitheses, they are contradictory, different in kind. Hence dialogue can occur in the domain of mode (form) and in the domain of meaning (content), but it cannot occur between mode and meaning. Equally, these mutually exclusive spheres exist necessarily together. This clarity with regard to the conditions for dialectic potentially provides a clearing for a doubled domain – one that includes both moral norms and ethical identities; however, the political potential in this diremptive ethics is inevitably undermined by an aesthetic ideology directed toward (necessarily) communicative felicity. Viewed from this perspective, the conflicting either/or opposition between a relativising pure historicism and the absolutism of transcendentalism which Habermas sees as organising the failures of modernity (‘the one side carries the burden of self-referential, pragmatic contradictions and paradoxes that violate our need for consistency; the other side is burdened with a foundationalism that conflicts with our consciousness of the fallibility of human knowledge’), is not an either/or opposition, but an unavoidable ontological crisis. Whereas this ‘unavoidable experience’ of crisis is, for Habermas, definitive of modernity, linked with the life world and marking the opportunity for exploring ‘a third path’ to overcoming,47 the trajectory of de Man’s thinking makes this ontological dilemma, ultimately, a linguistic condition, a condition upon which the very possibility of criticism rests.

Notes Notes to Preface 1

2 3 4

This hoax was perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, who decided to test the intellectual rigorousness of the review process in the humanities. He submitted an article called ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermenuetics of Quantum Gravity’ to Social Text for publication in the Spring/Summer issue (1996) called ‘Science Wars’. The article was nonsensical, and although it was not the policy for the journal to have submissions peer reviewed, the editor had asked for some revisions. Sokal refused to make the revisions but the article was published anyway. He later revealed his hoax in another journal called Lingua Franca. This event provoked a furore within the academy regarding intellectual responsibility. Sokal and Jean Bricmont later published their misgivings about work being produced on the science/culture front in Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books, 1998). Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 16–17. Ibid., 57–82. Ibid., 41.

Notes to Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1982), 5. David Hoy, ‘Splitting the Difference: Habermas’s Critique of Derrida’, in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, (ed.) Passerin d’Entreves and Benhabib (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 124. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (ed.) John W. Yolton (London: Everyman, 1961), 174–268. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1929), 283. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 29. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1987), 7. Karl Marx, ‘The Destiny of Capitalism’, in Marxism: Essential Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1988), 49–51. Christopher Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction, and Critical Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 70–81.

168 Notes 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 13. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 9. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 6. Arjun Appardurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32–47. Andrew Feenberg, ‘Modernity Theory and Technological Studies’, in Modernity and Technology, (ed.) Misa Brey and Feenberg (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), 96–7. Lindsay Waters, ‘Introduction, Paul de Man: Life and Works’, in Critical Writings: 1953–1978 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989), ix–lxxiv. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 5. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2. Ibid., 2. Iibid., 2. Many studies in the 1980s and 1990s, coming out of art history departments and taking their lead from the work done by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man sought to link allegory with postmodernism. See, for example, Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’ (October, no. 12, Spring 1980), 67–86 and (October, no. 13, Summer 1980), 59–80, Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruin (Cambridge, MA. and London: The MIT Press, 1993), B. H. D. Buchloh, ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’ (Artforum, vol. 21, no. 1, September 1982), 43–56, Joel Fineman ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire’ (October, no. 12, Spring 1980), 43–56. Most of this output seems to be directed towards defining the postmodern and then using that definition to reread modernism. In literature departments the revival of interest in allegory precedes the focus on defining the postmodern and instead looks at allegory, as a problem of ‘words, words, words’ in relation to philosophical reasoning. The attempt here has been to revive allegory since its early nineteenth-century demise and endow it with the status of a ‘genre’ which nevertheless has a protean quality. See, for example, Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964); Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1967); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 167. Ibid., 168 Ibid., 168.. Allegory and Violence, 2. Ibid., 3.

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27 Ibid., 3. 28 Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 168.

Notes to Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 2, 63, 152. Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1973), 365. Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University, 1973), 8–9. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3. This citation is taken from cited Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship (Fort Worth: Holt, Reinhart, 1970), 10. Jacob Burckhardt, Reflexions on History (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1943), 67–70. Ibid., 139. The Seduction of Unreason, xi. Ibid., 55. Ibid., xiii. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 112. The Seduction of Unreason, 301. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (London: Penguin, 1981, 1953), 1–24. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), xi. Bernd Witte, ‘Benjamin and Lukács. Historical Notes on the Relationship between Their Political and Aesthetic Theories’. New German Critique, No. 5 (Spring) 1975, 3–26. Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Leslie Esther, introduction by John Rees, postface by Slavoj Žižec (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 47. This text was never published and considered lost by Lukács himself until it was discovered in the CPSU archives in Moscow. It was first published in Hungarian in 1996. ‘Benjamin and Lukács’, 26. Susan Buck-Morss is guilty of this when she says ‘[d]econstruction is a form of postmodernism, the philosophy of which, it could be argued, refers less to a chronological period than an epistemological stance. Whereas modernism in philosophical terms is wedded to the Enlightenment dream of a substantively rational society, postmodernism takes its philosophical lead from Nietzsche,

170 Notes

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Baudelaire, and Blanqui.’ She then places Benjamin precisely: ‘If the terms are defined this way, Benjamin must be counted as a modernist.’ Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA. and London: MIT Press, 1989), 477n. 35. Metahistory, 8. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Oxon: Routledge, 1998), 152. Paul de Man, ‘Reading and History’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 68. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 370. Paul de Man, ‘Resistance to Theory’, in The Resistance to Theory, (ed.) Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. It is possible that de Man was familiar with Benjamin’s work as early as the 1940s through his uncle Hendrik de Man who was at the University of Frankfurt at the time of the establishment of the Institut für Sozialforschung. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 122–3. Barbara Johnson has claimed that de Man’s writing was incomprehensible without an understanding of Walter Benjamin (in conversation, 1991). Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), x–xi. ‘Benjamin and Lukács’, 26. Ibid., 26. Dr Wolf-Peter Koch wrote a letter to Schmitt to query his involvement in the Nazi regime. Schmitt’s reply was only to address certain theoretical aspects of constitutional law. See Wolf-Peter Koch, Die Reform des Strafverfahrenrechts im Dritten Reich unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des StVO-Entwurfs 1939: Ein Beitrag zur Strafrechtsgeschichte, Inaugural-Dissertation (der Juristischen Fakultät der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1972), 65. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 79–80. William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: the Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1994), 13–38. The book was first published by the Institute for Social Research in 1944 to mark the fiftieth birthday of Friedrich Pollock, and then again in 1944 by Querido of Amsterdam (who specialised in publishing works of German writers in exile). Jay Bernstein, ‘Art Against Enlightenment’, in The Problems of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 51. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 210. Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1981), 24. Ibid., 34. Peter Osborne, ‘Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: the Problem of “Postmodern Art” ’ in The Problems of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 30.

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39 Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 313. 40 Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 127. 41 The extent of Schmitt’s collaboration has produced masses of research in the German and in the English tradition and one of the major issues is whether or not his thinking led naturally to his collaboration with the Nazis. On July 13th after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, for example, Hitler gave a speech proclaiming himself ‘the supreme judge of the German people’ and admitted to having given the order to ‘cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life’ and promised that ‘for all time to come … if anyone raises his hand to the State, then certain death is his lot’. Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 469. When Schmitt, the following day, published an essay called ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht’ [The Führer Protects the Law], was he genuine or merely seeking to save himself? 42 Guy Oates, ‘Introduction’ to Political Romanticism by Carl Schmitt (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1986), x–xi. 43 A point that Jürgen Habermas makes is that one of the reasons that Schmitt continued to be relevant to young German intellectuals, especially after 1989 was the very fact that he did not allow himself to be de-Nazified and so ‘did not have to remain silent; he was able to articulate German continuities with which others went on living, but about which they never spoke’. Jürgen Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Stephen Rendall (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 115. 44 Between the Norm and the Exception, 452. 45 Ibid., 15. 46 Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt via Thomas Hobbs’, in Walter Benjamin: Cultural Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 451–5. As Bredekamp notes, Alexander Kojève is purported to have dismissed himself from a lecture in the Freie Universität in Berlin in 1967 in order to visit Schmitt whom he believed was the only person worth talking to in Germany. 47 Peter Dodge, A Documentary Study of Hendrik de Man, Socialist Critic of Marxism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3. 48 Hendrik de Man, Manifeste aux members du parti ouvrier belge, Gazette de Charleroi, 3 July 1940. 49 Hendrik de Man, The Psychology of Socialism, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), 326–7. 50 Redfield also points out that the most damning of the wartime journalism is the article ‘The Jews in Contemporary Literature’ which condemns ‘vulgar anti-Semitism’, proposes that the evolution of European literature has been uninfluenced by Jewish writers (though Kafka is cited as integral to this great tradition) and that the tradition would remain unaffected by ‘the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe’. Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 185. 51 Kim Wheatley, Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 99. 52 See Nora Crook, ‘ “Casualty”, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain’s Most Corrupt Poet of Error’, in Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality,

172 Notes Graham Allen, Carrie Griffin and Mary O’Connell (eds) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 61–74.

Notes to Chapter 2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1985), 166. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. 3 Peter Osborne, marks out four periods of reception history of Benjamin’s work: ‘lifetime’, that is the reception of his work in his own lifetime 1892–1940 which focused on his Origin of German Tragic Drama, One-Way Street and later essays for the Institute for Social Research; ‘recovery and polemic’, which focused on his Theses on the Philosophy of History and the polemical opposition which split his theological and materialist interests; ‘consolidation and scholarship’, where the publication of the Arcades Project (1982) and Moscow Diary (1980) orchestrates a shift from literary criticism to philosophical, historical and cultural issues; and ‘diversification and appropriation’. It is in the fourth period of reception that the image of Benjamin along with its ‘doppelgänger’, the angel of history’, in the context of the industrialisation of academic publishing and genuinely ‘transnational and transdisciplinary concerns’ circulate as a fertile cultural resource in many fields of inquiry. See Osborne, Peter (ed.) Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (Oxon: Routledge, 2005). It should also be noted, however, that the influence of Benjamin’s writing in Germany was ‘short’ and ‘almost eruptive’ according to Habermas, never exploding into the full-scale ‘Benjamania’ witnessed in the AngloAmerican intellectual community. 4 This crisis was inspired by philosophers such as William Dilthey and Friedrich Nietzsche. 5 Hannah Arendt, ‘Walter Benjamin 1892–1940’, Men in Dark Times (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 155. 6 Ernst Bloch, ‘Philosophy as Cabaret’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. 1, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge: 2005), 4. 7 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Picador, 1972), 129. 8 This statement was made by Irving Wohlfarth and quoted in John McCole, Walter Benjamin and The Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 17. 9 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008), 134. 10 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 7. 11 Michael Jennings, ‘Benjamin as a Reader of Hölderlin’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume II, Modernity, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 10. 12 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 102. 1 2

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13 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 18. 14 Lloyd Spencer, ‘Allegory in the World of the Commodity: the Importance of Central Park’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume II, Modernity, (ed) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 121. 15 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 232. 16 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1982), 178. 17 The death’s head is itself an allegorical figure: an emblem of mortality, of the transience of human life and hence the futility and vanity of the intellectual world and earthly pleasure; the figure of disruption as in the Hans Holbein painting ‘The Ambassadors’ in which the perfectly ordered Cartesian world of the fifteenth century is challenged by a death’s head emerging from the bottom of the painting; a memento mori (remember you must die); the sephira daath or symbol of spiritual rebirth only possible through spiritual death, on the tree of life in the Kabbala; of Golgotha in Christianity. The ‘death’s head’ is also almost prophetic of what was to come in Germany: after Heinrich Himmler was appointed to take charge of the concentration camps he created a special unit of the SS which was called the ‘Death’s Head Unit’ or the Totenkopfverbande. 18 Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History and Art (SoPhi: University of Jyväskylä, 1998), 12. 19 In her book Now-Time/Image-Space, Lindroos juxtaposes what she calls cairological time with chronological time: chronological time is abstract, linear time which is associated with motion and derived from Aristotle; cairological time, on the other hand, is a field of action ‘which is essentially tied to the present time and its plural temporal dynamics, as opposed to its homogeneous organisation’. Now-Time/ImageSpace: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History and Art, (SoPhi: University of Jyväskylä, 1998), 12. Although I accept her understanding of cairological time, I disagree that this should be understood solely in contrast to chronological time in Benjamin’s work. Benjamin’s interest in the philosophy of language also has him invoke a view of time that is semiotic, therefore secular historical time is diachronic rather than chronological. 20 Klee began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1919. The Nazis panned the Bauhaus for its so-called ‘degenerate art’ and then closed it down when they came to power in 1933. 21 The Angélus Novus is clearly an ambivalent, androgynous figure: the eyes resemble breasts, the nose bridge a phallus. This image is repeated in the nostrils and the upper lip. Ominously suspended in an aura of light, it exudes sublime, or perhaps demonic, fixation, portending a pervasive but masked and hence hidden violence, perhaps terror. Full sweetheart lips frame an open mouth, but inside the mouth there are fang-like teeth: one eye looks out directly at the viewer while the other looks somewhere else. Commentators have suggested that its headdress consists of sacred scrolls and that the appendages on either side are clipped wings. Nevertheless, the head adornment also resembles rolled locks of a lawyer’s wig; the appendages suggest hands with four fingers and a thumb rather than feathered instruments for flight. The feet are also more phallic-shaped rounded toes than claws. What is most fascinating about the angel, however, is the way it depicts gradations of transparency: it appears clothed, in a priest-like soutane or a preacher’s talar, but

174 Notes

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27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35

it is possible to see naked body parts – legs and a dagger-like phallus – beneath a skirt. In the centre of the body positioned near the breast is an arrow-shaped box, coloured a deep orange, the strongest colour in the painting, which points upward. There is a shape which hangs from the throat into the geometrical orange centre, which could be a key. On the other hand, if the arrow-shaped box is perceived as something inside the body, something hanging from inside the throat, the shape looks like the silhouette of a human being swinging from the rope of a gallows. The enigmatic painting lends itself to a myriad of possibilities for interpretation: it could for example be read as an allegorical figure of counter-revolution, which would be interesting given some of the writers Benjamin chooses to align himself with, as we shall see. Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 62. Origin, 166. George Steiner, ‘Introduction’ to Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 20. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), Preface; and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 326–39. We could say that this disagreement belongs to the second phase of reception history of Benjamin’s works. It is now recognised that earlier reactionary influences on Benjamin, such as Ludwig Klages and later Carl Schmitt considerably compromise any easy political division between left and right, in that Benjamin’s early thinking brought together the extremes of the political right and left. Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, Volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 94. The poem is translated by Gary Smith and reproduced in the notes to a letter to Gershom Scholem in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, edited and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 182–3. Ibid., 183. ‘Experience’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 296. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 234. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 241. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-raising or rescuing critique’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume 1, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 107–8. In this Habermas clearly takes over metaphors found in Benjamin’s own work. For example, Samuel Weber notes in another context that Habermas recuperates Benjamin’s metaphors in his account of Foucault’s ‘transcendental Historicism’ where ‘new discursive formations’ are said to ‘burst upon the scene [Ausblitzen] and disappear without any order’ and ‘… history freezes [erstarrt] into an iceberg, laced with the crystalline forms of arbitrary discursive formations’. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 134. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 113.

Notes

175

36 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, London: Collins and Fontana, 1973), 254–5. 37 Critical Evaluations, Volume 1, 131. 38 The shift was also brought about by his meeting Asja Lacis, a Latvian Communist in Capri, with whom he developed an erotic fixation after the completion of his seminal but ill-fated Habilitation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 39 Fire Alarm, 74. 40 Ibid., 1. 41 Dialectics of Seeing, 31–2. 42 Leslie Esther, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London and Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 2000), 15. 43 Ibid., 16–17. 44 George Steiner, ‘To Speak of Walter Benjamin’, in Benjamin Studien/Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1 May 2002), 11–23. The others include the formative role of youth movements and Benjamin’s own active participation in the Freideutsche Jugend and commitment to Gustav Wyneken’s educational reform which contributed to a tension between assimilationist nationalism and a flirtation with Zionism; his pacifist stance with regard to WWI which resulted in a split with Wyneken who supported militarism; the German that grows out of Lutheran pietism and romanticism; the bricolage ethos of the collector; his interest in graphology; his fascination with Baudelaire, with surrealism, dreams and poetics and their possible relation to his experimentation with narcotics; his relation to Marxism and the notion of the materiality and ‘technicity’ of language that he derives from Marxist theory and from out of which he formulates a chiasmic relation between the aestheticisation of politics in German fascism and the politicisation of art under communism; his relationship with Scholem, Adorno, Horkheimer and Brecht; his relation to the complex question of translation; his relation to eros, personal and theoretical; and finally the whole big question of theology. (Steiner ‘To Speak of Walter Benjamin’ in Benjamin Studien/Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1 May 2002), 11–23. 45 George Moss, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3. 46 Ibid., 4. 47 Ludwig Quessel, ‘Die jüdische Neukolonisation Palästinas’, in Sozialistisches Monatshefte (Bd, Heft 11, 4 June 1914), 693. 48 In a letter to Gershom Scholem he describes ‘Weimar’, an essay he published in Neue Schweizer Rundschau in 1928, as ‘most charmingly’, ‘the side of my Janus face that is turned away from the Soviet state’ and considers this in contrast to ‘Marseilles’ which shows the other side. The letter itself also describes his trust in Leo Strauss, then at the Jewish Academy in Berlin and to whom he had just sent Scholem’s letter on Goldberg and asked for it to be copied and distributed in partibus infidelium. His admitted affinity with Strauss is of some importance because Strauss is a key Jewish thinker in the Weimar period who challenged the prevailing notion that critique had always to be secular. At the time that Benjamin was describing his Janus face and extolling a trust in Strauss, Strauss himself was questioning the belief that post-Enlightenment modernity had, in embracing science, overcome prejudice. Weimar was at this time the hotbed of crisis and radicalism, the confrontation between theology and secularism becoming evident in the Political Theology of

176 Notes Carl Schmitt. Within the institution intellectuals were becoming increasingly disillusioned with neo-Kantianism and outside the university Jews and gentiles alike were becoming, for economic as well as cultural reasons, disillusioned with liberalism. Strauss’s contribution to the debate was a volume that challenged modernity’s reduction of critique to secularisation, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, which he published in 1930. The book takes Spinoza’s critique of Christianity and Judaism (through Calvin and Maimonides) as a key moment in the displacement of religion in Enlightenment discourse. 49 Leo Strauss, ‘Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilisation’, in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 87–136. 50 Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 29. 51 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Althine Press, 1981), 61–155. 52 Anson Rabinbach, ‘Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch and modern German Jewish Messianism, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. III, 1935–1938, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 120. 53 Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1967). 54 Rodger Komenetz, ‘Forward’ (1995) to On Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), xiii. 55 Ibid., xviii. 56 These letters are only partially published, the originals being in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. 57 Rabinbach, Critical Evaluations, Volume III, 126. 58 Ibid., 127. 59 Walter Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 174. 60 Ibid., 3–5. 61 Ibid., 4. This essay was first published in Der Anfang under the name of Ardor. 62 ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 6. 63 ‘The Life of Students’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 37. 64 Ibid., 38. 65 As we shall see, the notion of something pernicious coming from ‘outside’ is a theme that he would have found in Ludwig Klages, not to mention Carl Schmitt. 66 Walter Benjamin to Ludwig Strauss, 21 November 1912, GS 2.3, (ed.) Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), 839. 67 Stephanie Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 19. 68 Correspondence, 226. 69 Correspondence, 79–80. 70 Ibid., 99–100. 71 Ibid., 215. 72 Ibid., 215. 73 Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 91–2.

Notes

177

74 In 1933 Benjamin also was forced to question assimilationism when he wrote to Scholem that he had ‘tried to reflect on the implications of events in Germany for the future history of the Jews. With very little success. In any event the emancipation of the Jews stands in a new light.’ Correspondence, 411. 75 Ibid., 216. 76 Ibid., 220. 77 Ibid., 168. 78 Ibid., 385. 79 Ibid., 98. 80 Ibid., 97–8. 81 Ibid., 168. 82 But contrary to Wolin’s reading of the Max Reinhardt staging of Gerhart Hauptmann’s pacifist Festspiel in deutschen Reiman (1913), Benjamin’s reaction to the event was both Kantian, and also extremely political: though he did view the controversy that ensued over the fact that the play did not unmitigatedly, patriotically embrace the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in 1813, a direct assault on the spiritual autonomy of youth, his reaction was anything but apolitical. He reacted with a review called ‘Gedanken Über Gerhart Hauptmanns Festspiel’ in which he extols the importance of being inspired by a future task, historical ‘ideas’ as opposed to ‘facts’, and ends by embracing pacifism: ‘Das fest feiert den Frieden als den verborgenen Sinn des Kampfes. Der erkämpfte Friede wird die Kulture bringen. [The festival celebrates peace as the hidden sense of war. The peace fought for will bring culture].’ (GS., 59) His defence of youth for its own sake and education for its own sake in ‘The Life of Students’ must be paralleled with his own very ‘committed’ pacifism as witnessed by the elaborate methods he used to avoid the draft. This, as George Steiner points out, aspect of his biography has not yet been fully investigated. A clarification of the precise relation to the German expressionists, who were for the most part pacifists, would be a good starting-point. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetics of Redemption (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994), 8. 83 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: the colour of experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 1. 84 Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 37. 85 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Book II, Part 19, trans. Daniel C. Stevenson (Internet: Internet Classic Archives, 1994–2000). 86 Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingbrook: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1929), 14–37. 87 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come forward as Science, trans. Paul Carus (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), 65. 88 ‘On Perception’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 94. 89 Ibid., 96. 90 Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’ to Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1973), 46. 91 Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 49. 92 Fire Alarm, 3. 93 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Concept of Time in the Science of History’, in Supplements:

178 Notes

94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116

from the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John Van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 56. Correspondence, 82. Chris P. Long, ‘Art’s Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art and Politics’, in New German Critique, No 83, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, (Spring–Summer 2001), 89–115. Walter Benjamin, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds) (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 252. Ibid., 256. ‘Art’s Fateful Hour’, 97. ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’, 269. Ibid., 270. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings, (ed.) by David Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 206. Ibid. 338–9. ‘On Walter Benjamin’, in Cultural Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. III, 1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (1827), Nos. 314 and 1113, GA ix. 523, 639, quoted in Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 160, 165. Bainard Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol II, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 57. Düttman Alexander García, The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, trans. Arline Lyons (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 35. ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 69. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Frank Stagg, New Testament Theology (New York: Broadman, 1962), 24. ‘As the Logos, Jesus Christ is God in self-revelation (Light) and redemption (Life). He is God to the extent that he can be present to man and knowable to man. … Yet the Logos is in some sense distinguishable from God, for “the Logos was with God.” God and the Logos are not two beings, and yet they are also not simply identical. … The paradox that the Logos is God and yet it is in some sense distinguishable from God is maintained in the body of the Gospel. … The Logos is God active in creation, revelation, and redemption. Jesus Christ not only gives God’s Word to us humans; he is the Word. He is the true word of ultimate reality revealed in a Person. The Logos is God, distinguishable in thought yet not separable in fact.’ (Frank Stagg, New Testament Theology, Broadman, 1962). ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 19. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 65.

Notes 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

142 143 144 145 146

147 148

179

Ibid., 65. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 68. ibid., 70. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 253. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 257. ibid., 257. Ibid., 258. ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 18. Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe. trans. Gutman, Kristeller and Randall, Jr. (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1963), 68–9. J. W. von Goethe, Scientific Studies (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 39. ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin: “The Poet’s Courage” and “Timidity” ’ in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 25. Lebensphilosophie is a German phenomenon which originated in the eighteenth century as a resistance to enlightenment philosophy (anti-Kantian) and science in the name of ‘life’. In the nineteenth century it was first the Jena romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Jacobi, and Novalis, to name a few – and then Bachhofen, Nietzsche and Dilthey, who further developed the philosophy, making connections between an organic temporality, aesthetics and psychology. In the twentieth century it was identified with the protests of the life reform movement which included the green movement and youth movement and advocated naturopathic remedies and nudism as an antidote to the industrialised and positivistic Prussian bureaucracy. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980), 191. Nitzan Lebovic, ‘The Beauty and Terror of Lebensphilosophie: Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Baeumler’, South Central Review (23.1, 2006), 25. Ibid., 24. http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/Man_and_Earth.html [accessed August 2010] Mensche und Erde, was republished in 1980 when the Green Party was established. Ibid. The ancient Greeks desired to wed together man’s inner and outer beauty which they read in the images of the Olympians (kalokagathie); the men of the Middle Ages sought to have the soul ascend and unite with God; the age of Goethe desired perfection of style. Ibid. ‘Life of Students’, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 37.

180 Notes 149 150 151 152 153

154

155 156

157 158 159

160 161 162 163 164 165

‘Review of Bernoulli’s Bachofen’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 427. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 132–3. Correspondence, 366. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, trans. Rodney Livingston et al., eds Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 320–1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Johann Jakob Bachofen’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al., eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 83–4. ‘Curriculum Vitae (III)’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 78. In this regard Benjamin also used the methodological ideas of the art historian Alois Riegl, especially his doctrine of the Kunstwollen, which he understands as the manner or predisposition of a culture in viewing art objects of all epochs from its own perspective, or Kunstwollen. Benjamin included three footnotes in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels acknowledging his debt to Schmitt. These were excluded in the two-volume edition of Benjamin’s work published by Theodor and Greta Adorno in 1955. Walter Benjamin, ‘Lebenslauf’ Gesammelte Schriften 7:1:219. The contents of the letter are as follows: Sehr geehrter Herr Professor, sie erhalten dieser Tage vom Verlage mein Buch Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Mit diesen Zeilen möchte ich es Ihnen nicht nur ankündigen, sondern Ihnen auch meine Freude darüber aussprechen, daβ ich es auf Veranlassung von Herrn Albert Salomon, Ihnen zusenden darf. Sie werden sehr schnell bemerken, wievel das Buch in seiner Darstellung der Lehre von der Souveränität im 17. Jahrhundert Ihnen verdankt. Vielleicht darf ich Ihnen darüber hinausgehend sagen, daβ ich auch Ihren späteren Werken, vor allem der Diktatur eine Bestätigung meiner kunstphilosophischen Forschungsweisen durch Ihre staatsphilosophischen entnommen habe. Wenn Ihnen die Lektüre meines Buches dieses Gefühl verständlich erscheinen läβt, so ist die Absicht seiner Űbersendung erfüllt.    Mit dem Ausdruck besonderer Hochschätzung    Ihr sehr ergebener   Walter Benjamin Carl Schmitt, Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1914), 40–2. Theodor Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 227–41. Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 42. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 5. Tracey Strong, ‘Forward’ to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, xi–xii. Tracy Strong makes the claim that Schmitt’s anti-Semitism in this book is different

Notes

166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

192

181

than the Nazi anti-Semitism and linked with Hobbs’ in that the ‘event of Christianity is political rather than religious’. Tracey Strong ‘Forward’ to Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xxiii. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 52. Ibid., 52–3. ‘Critique of Violence’, in Selected Writings: Vol. 1, 238. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 247. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 203–4. Ibid., 249–50. Ibid., 251–2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, (eds) Drusilla Cornel, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 62. Political Theology, 5–7. Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 392. Origin, 20. Burkhardt Lindner, ‘Habilitationsakte Benjamin: Űber ein “academisches Trauerspiel” und über ein Vorkapitel der “Frankfurter Schule’” , Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 14 (1984), 147–65. Dominik Finkelde, ‘The Presence of the Baroque: Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in Contemporary Contexts’, in A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, (ed.) Rolf J. Goebel (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), 47. ‘Curriculum Vitae (III)’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 78. Alois Riegl, ‘Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, (ed.) Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 159–60. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 153. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997, 2004), 77, 223. ‘Curriculum Vitae (III)’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, 78. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 668. Origin, 58. Walter Benjamin, ‘Curriculum Vitae (IV)’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., (eds) Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 382. This book has been translated as Problems of Style (1992) which is misleading. It should be something more like Questions of Style.

182 Notes 193 Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. Evelyn Kain (Princeton, Princeton: University, 1992), 229. 194 ‘News about Flowers’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–193, 156. 195 Walter Benjamin, Briefe, Vol. 1, (ed.) by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 372. 196 See also Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et al., eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 104. 197 Origin, 29. 198 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 3. 199 Origin, 30. 200 Ibid., 30. 201 Ibid., 33. 202 Origin, 35. 203 Origin, 36. 204 Bruce Lincoln, ‘Hermann Güntert in the 1930’s: Heidelburg, Politics and the Study of Germanic/Indogermanic Religion’, in The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism by Horst Junginger, (Leiden, Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008), 180. 205 Origin, 36. 206 Ibid., 38. 207 Origin, 48. 208 Michael Guber, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 204. 209 Origin, 55. 210 ‘Fate and Character’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 203–4. 211 Problems of Style, 229. 212 Origin, 63. 213 The Verso translation of The Origin of German Tragic Drama translates Ausnahmezustand as ‘state of emergency’ which does serve to differentiate Schmitt’s understanding and Benjamin’s (though this may not have been the intention). The original, however, uses both Ausnahmezustand and Ausnahmefalles interchangeably. See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 245–6. 214 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I.1, Unter Mitwirkung von Theodor Adorno und Gershom Scholem herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 246. 215 Origin, 66. 216 Origin, 81. 217 Origin, 81. 218 Origin, 81. 219 Origin, 66. 220 Quoted from Opitz in Origin, 62. 221 Origin, 66.

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222 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 46. 223 Ibid., 71. 224 Origin, 71, 156. 225 Benjamin notes that this apotheosis of the ethical individual has a precedent in classicism, but without the redemptive function. 226 Origin, 163. 227 Origin, 163. 228 Origin, quoted from Creuzer, 164. 229 Origin, 165. 230 Ibid., 165–6. 231 Ibid., 167. 232 Origin, 168. 233 Origin, 170. 234 Origin, 175. 235 Origin, 176. 236 Origin, 176. 237 Origin, 182. 238 Ibid., 183. 239 Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 55. 240 Origin, 177. 241 The Dialectics of Seeing, 17. 242 Ibid., 18. 243 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston and Harry Zohn, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the University of Harvard Press, 2006), 159. 244 Ibid., 27. 245 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462. 246 Ibid., 462. 247 Arcades Project, 476. 248 Correspondence, 542 and 544. 249 Arcades Project, 400. 250 The following poem was written by Hitler in 1915 during WWI when he was fighting for the Germans on the Western Front. I often go on bitter nights To Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade With dark powers to weave a union – The runic letter the moon makes with its magic spell And all who are full of impudence during the day Are made small by the magic formula! They draw shining steel – but instead of going into combat They solidify into stalagmites. So the false ones part from the real ones – I reach into a nest of words And then give to the good and just

184 Notes

With my formula blessings and prosperity



‘A few weeks later he [Hitler] made a portentous prophecy to his comrades: “You will hear much about me. Just wait until my time comes.” (quoted from John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1992), 64. Carl Jung wrote an essay called ‘Wotan’ in Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich: n.s., III, 1936), 657–69. Correspondence, 476. Correspondence, 482. Arcades Project, 9. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 908. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 916. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance générale II, quoted in Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. E. P. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972), 292. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Articles justicatifs pour Charles Baudelaire, auteur des Fleurs du mal, (Paris, 1957) cited in The Arcades Project, 234. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (London: The Harvester Press, 1982), 132. Correspondence, 230. Benjamin repeatedly refers to Baudelaire’s life as one of allegory. Arcades Project, 336. Arcades Project, 463. Arcades Project, 464. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Lesson of Baudelaire’, Tyro, Vol. I (Spring 1921), 4 . Stephan George produced a German translation of Les Fleurs du Mal which is still considered superior to any other. His focus was on the specific poetics of alliteration and rhythm rather than translated thematic content. He considered these works not translations but ‘adaptations’, a Germanising of Baudelaire. Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Reflections on the Chapter “Modernity” in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Fragments’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume II, Modernity, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 110. T. J. Clark, ‘Should Benjamin have Read Marx?’, in Critical Evaluations, Volume 2, 86. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 112–13. Ibid., 115. ‘Le Cygne’ in Les Fleurs du mal, 268. Arcades Project, 21. Arcades Project, 15. Les Fleurs du mal, 92. Correspondence, 557. ‘On the Concept of History’ in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 396. Arcades Project, 195. Arcades Project, 241.

251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268

269

270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281

Notes

185

282 Alphonse Toussenel, Passional Zoology; Or, Spirit of the Beasts of France, trans. M. Edgeworth Lazarus (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1852), 140, 142. 283 Arcades Project, 192–3. 284 Letter of 1 February 1939 in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 206. 285 ‘Force of Law’ 62–3.

Notes to Chapter 3 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

See for example, William E. Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism’, in The Review of Politics, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), 299–322. J. Hillis Miller, Peter Brooks, A. Bartlett Giamati, Geoffrey Hartman, Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, E. S Burt, Andrzej Warminski, Jacques Derrida all contributed tributes extolling his character variously as magical, generous and warm coupled with intellectual authority and brilliance as a teacher. The Lesson of Paul de Man, Yale French Studies Special Issue, No. 69, 1985, 3–21. Rodolph Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: the Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 178. Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 325–6. Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5. David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 131. The Wild Card of Reading, 300. Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London: Routledge, 1988), 189–90. Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 175. Lindsay Waters, ‘Professah de man – he dead’, American Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), 284–303. Despite his oscillation in opinion of de Man’s work, Gasché perseveres and eventually comes to terms with de Man: ‘If, in this book, the fluctuations in my evaluation of his writings have not been corrected, it is primarily to emphasise that the questioning approach that de Man’s singular work invites is a “process” in which thinking must remain open to the need to rethink that work again and again.’ The Wild Card of Reading, 271. The Wild Card of Reading, 239. ‘Professah de man – he dead’, 285–6. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9–10, 358–9. Ibid., 235. Paul de Man, ‘Montaigne and Transcendence’, in Critical Writings, 1953–1978, (ed.) Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 10. Marc Redfield, ‘John Guillory’s Misreading of Paul de Man’, in Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Mark Redfield (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 99.

186 Notes 20 It is possible that de Man may have had access to some of Benjamin’s works -who was not unknown before his death in 1940 – as early as 1940 in his role as literary editor for Le Soir. This is all the more likely given his role and his close connection with his uncle Hendrik de Man, who had affiliations with the Institut für Sozialforschung. 21 The Wild Card of Reading, 1. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Ibid., 19. 24 Ibid., 19. 25 This may be because of his continental education. However, an early connection between de Man and Benjamin might be made through the discussions about the future of socialism which involved Hendrik de Man whose book On the Psychology of Marxism (1927) fed into debates about the role of psychology in socialism. Martin Jay notes that ‘A figure of some importance in left-wing university circles after 1929 was the Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man’ who had ‘attempted to replace economic determinism with a more subjectively grounded activism. De Man attacked the utilitarian, interest-oriented psychology he attributed to Marx, stressing instead the irrational roots of radical action.’ He also suggests that it may have been that de Man was specifically brought into the University of Frankfurt as a professor of social psychology in order to combat the orthodox perspective of the Institute, a strategy which luckily, from Jay’s point of view, did not work. De Man’s inclusion of subjectivity (irrationalism) is viewed by Jay as the reason that de Man could succumb to fascism. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–50 (London: Heinemann, 1973), 87. Also, like Benjamin, Paul de Man had connections with George Bataille in the 1940s, through the journal Critique, which Bataille edited. 26 Lindsay Waters, ‘Introduction; Paul de Man: Life and Works’ in Critical Writings, 1953–1978 by Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), liv. 27 Ibid., lv. 28 ‘Montaigne and Transcendence’ in Critical Writings, 4. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 5. 32 Ibid., 6. 33 Ibid., 7. 34 Ibid., 7. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 Ibid., 10. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 Paul de Man, ‘The Inward Generation’, in Critical Writings, 12. 39 Ibid., 14. 40 Ibid., 14. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), 217. 43 ‘The Inward Generation’, Critical Writings, 12. 44 Ibid., 14–15. 45 Ibid., 15.

Notes

187

46 ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 268. 47 ‘The Inward Generation’, Critical Writings, 17. 48 Jean Rosiek, ‘Apocalyptic and Secular Allegory, or How to Avoid Getting Excited – Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man’, Orbis Litterarum 48 (1993), 145. 49 In the manner of Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science’, this essay in many ways signals the redundancy of post-Saussurian linguistics for the study of literature. 50 Paul de Man, ‘Crisis and Criticism’, in Blindness and Insight (London: Methuen, 1971), 6. 51 Ibid., 9. 52 ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 68–73. 53 Ibid., 62. 54 ‘Crisis and Criticism’, 12. 55 Ibid., 11. 56 Ibid., 13. 57 Ibid., 16. 58 Ibid., 16. 59 Geoffrey Hartman argues that this reading of Husserl may be a form of reaction formation, since Husserl’s blindness to his failure to self-criticise parallels de Man’s own failure as a European who ‘escaped from the necessity of self-criticism that is prior to all philosophical truth about the self. Hartman, Geoffrey, ‘Looking Back on Paul de Man’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 18. 60 Christopher Norris, Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 84. 61 ‘Crisis and Criticism’, 17. 62 ‘Crisis and Criticism’, 18. 63 ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 66. 64 Ibid., 19. 65 Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 111, 161. 66 Robert Moynihan, ‘An Interview with Paul de Man’, introduction by J. Hillis Miller in The Yale Review (1984), 586. 67 ‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism’, in Blindness and Insight, 26. 68 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 1–6. 69 ‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism’, Blindness and Insight, 26. 70 Ibid., 31. 71 Ibid., 31. 72 Ibid., 32. 73 Ibid., 33. 74 ‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism’, 34–5. 75 Ibid., 33. 76 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I.1, Abhandlungen werkausgabe, Unter Mitwirkung von Theodor Adorno und Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 406. 77 Origin, 233. 78 Ibid., 232.

188 Notes 79 Jan Rosiek, Figures of Failure: Paul de Man’s Criticism 1953–1970 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1992), 190. 80 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: the problem of law in Walter Benjamin’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. 1, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 472. 81 Ibid. 473. 82 Ibid., 475. 83 Ibid., 477. 84 Ibid., 482. 85 Ibid., 482. 86 Ibid., 482. 87 Gadamer Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 1975), 65. 88 Ibid., 70. 89 ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight, 191. 90 William Wimsatt, ‘The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery’, in The Verbal Icon (Lexington, ICY.: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 108. 91 ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, 195. 92 Ibid., 196. 93 Ibid., 198. 94 Earl Wasserman, ‘The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge’, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1964), 22. 95 ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, 198. 96 Ibid., 199. 97 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 232. 98 ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, 201. 99 Saint-Preux says, ‘[w]hen I perceived the peaks of the mountains, my heart beat violently and said to me, “She is there.” The same thing happened to me on the sea at the sight of the European coast. The same thing had happened to me before at Meillerie as I discovered the house of the Baron d’Étange. The world is ever divided for me into only two regions, where she is and where she is not.’ Jean Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloise, trans. Judith H. McDowell (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 1968), 28. 100 Julie’s garden is described thus: ‘This place, although quite close to the house, is so hidden by a shady walk which separates them that it is visible from no part of the house. The dense foliage that surrounds it makes it impervious to the eye, and it is always carefully locked. I was no sooner inside and turned around than, the door being hidden by alders and Hazel trees which permit only two narrow passageways on the sides, I no longer saw by which way I had entered, and perceiving no door, I found myself there as if fallen from the sky.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloise, trans. Judith H. McDowell (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 1968), 304–5. 101 Ibid., 204. 102 Ibid., 205. 103 Ibid., 207. 104 Ibid., 208. 105 Ibid., 211.

Notes 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

189

Ibid., 212. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 214. Paul de Man, ‘Epistemology of Metaphor’, in Aesthetic Ideology, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 49. Ibid., 34. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 53. ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, 37. Ibid., 41–2. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 221. ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, 47. Ibid., 46. The Critique of Judgement, 116. Paul Guyer, ‘Kant’s Distinction Between the Sublime and the Beautiful’, in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 35, No. 4 (June 1982), 757. Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (London: Blackwell, 1991), 236. ‘Epistemology of Metaphor’, 49. Paul de Man, ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion’, in Aesthetic Ideology, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 51. Ibid., 52 Ibid., 52. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 56, quoted from Pascal’s Réflexions sur la géométrie en général; De l’esprit géométrique et de l’Art de persuader, in Oeuvres complètes, (ed.) Louis lafuma (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Collection l’Intégrale, 1963), 350. Ibid., 56. ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion’, 58–9. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59. Ibid.. 62. Ibid. 63, from Pascal’s Pensés, in Oeuvres complètes, (ed.) Louis lafuma (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Collection l’Intégrale, 1963), 514. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69. Rudolphe Gasché, ‘In-Difference to Philosophy: de Man on Kant, Hegel and

190 Notes

145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180

Nietzsche’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 272. ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, in Aesthetic Ideology, 71. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. Andrzej Warminski, ‘Introduction: Allegories of Reference’, in Aesthetic Ideology, by Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13. Paul de Man, ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 106. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 112–13. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 114. ibid., 115. Ibid., 115. Paul de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, in Aesthetic Ideology, 117. Ïbid., 118. Andrzej Warminski, ‘Introduction: Allegories of Reference’, in Aesthetic Ideology, 7. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133–4. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 144. Paul de Man, ‘Aesthetic Formalisation: Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 264. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1990), 27. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 42. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 167. Peter Firchow, ‘Introduction’ to Lucinde and the Fragments by Friedrich Schlegel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 23. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 48. ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, in Selected Writings Volume 1, 116–200. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1804 bis 1806 (Bonn: 1846), 23 quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 121. ‘The Concept of Criticism’, 124–5. Ibid., 137–8. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 164–5. ‘The Concept of Irony’, 165.

Notes 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

191

Ibid., 166. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 179. ‘The Concept of Irony’, 182. ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, 164. ‘The Concept of Irony’, 183. The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 358. ‘Shelley Disfigured’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 122.

Notes to Chapter 4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, in Shelley Poetical Works, (ed.) Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 798. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Triumph of Life in Shelley Poetical Works (ed.) Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 512. 3 Theresa Kelley, M., Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 144. The quotation inside the quotation is from William A. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 85. 4 Susan Brisman, ‘ “Unsaying His High Language”: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound’, in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1977), 86. 5 Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Preface’ in Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Continuum, 1979), vii. 6 Ibid, vii. 7 Neil Fraistat, ‘Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance’, in PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 3 (May 1994), 409–23. 8 Paul de Man, ‘The Concept of Irony’, in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 184. 9 Paul Foot reports in Red Shelley that Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half sister, understood that Shelley’s politics were integral to his poetry. When interviewed in 1878 at the age of 80 she said ‘Had it not been for his intense love of mankind, that fervid zeal of his which could not content itself with poetry alone, he would not have been the great poet you admire!’ Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Bookmarks, 1984), 142. This is still one of the most candid and equally sensitive renditions of Shelley’s political beliefs and complex behaviour available. 10 Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘Introduction’ to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi; a Romance; St Irvyne, or, The Rosicrucian (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press Ltd., 2002), 9–54. 11 Many of these reviews have been collected and published in Shelley: the Critical Heritage, ed. by James E. Barcus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Shelley reacted to the largely negative reviews in a letter to his publisher Charles Ollier where he says that it gives him ‘ a certain amount of pleasure to know that anyone likes [his] writings; but it is objection and enmity alone that rouses [his] curiousity’. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Containing Material Never 1

192 Notes

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Before Collected, Vo. II, (ed.) by Roger Ingpen (London: G. Bell and Sons., Ltd., 1914), 714–15. ‘Illegitimate Shelley’, 410–20. Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 3. Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 10. Marilyn Butler, ‘Myth and Mythmaking in the Shelley Circle’, ELH, Vol. 49, No. 1, (Spring 1982), 50–72. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1973), 115. The German expressionists believed, in contrast to the French impressionists, that art had a non-propagandistic power to change the world and had a moral responsibility to do so. Ernst Toller, for example, thought that art could throw ‘light on human conduct’ and reveal ‘the tragic sense of life’. Quoted in Helmut Gruber, ‘The Political-Ethical Mission of German Expressionism’ in The German Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Mar., 1967), 186–203. Most of the Expressionists were pacifists, individualists who were reluctant to attach themselves to a political party. By 1938 most, Toller amongst them, had long become disillusioned with the idea that aesthetic ‘will’ could be transformative and settled into banality. This is interesting in the light of Benjamin’s own pacifism and the debate over his political engagement in the early years as well as his belief in 1918 that ‘[e]very unlimited condition of the will leads to evil’ (Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 114). Robert Kaufman, ‘Aura, Still’ in Walter Benjamin and Art, (ed.) Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 135. The Brecht essay referred to here has never been translated. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 370. James E. Barcus (ed.) Shelley: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 226–8. Not all of the reviews were this bad; in fact The London Magazine and Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review in the same year (1820) said ‘[a]lthough there are some things in Mr Shelley’s philosophy against which we feel it a duty thus to protest, we must not suffer our indifference of opinion to make us insensible to his genius. As a poem, the work before us is replete with clear, pure, and majestic imagery, accompanied by a harmony as rich and various as that of the loftiest of our English poets.’ Shelley: the Critical Heritage, 245–6. Ibid., 341–2 352. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, (ed.) Stephan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30. Arnold Baron, (ed.), Poetry of Byron, Chosen and Arranged by Matthew Arnold (London: BiblioLife, 2009), 21. Mary Shelley, ‘Note’ to Prometheus Unbound in Shelley: Poetical Works, 270. Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Language of Paradox’, in The Language of Poetry: Lectures by Wallace Stevens, Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, and Philip Wheelright, (ed.) Allen Tate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), 54–30. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), 172. Ibid., 172. More recent scholarship is less faint-hearted: Kenneth Cameron’s two important volumes, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (1950) and Shelley: the Golden Years

Notes

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

193

(1974) are biographical works that follow the development of Shelley’s radicalism from his early novels Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne to his last works Prometheus Unbound and The Triumph of Life. Earl Wasserman’s Shelley: A Critical Reading reads two abiding philosophical convictions in Shelley’s work, ‘a denial of a creative and superintending deity’ and ‘his persuasion that human life was perfectible’, themes later mediated by those of mortality and transience and then a dawning sceptical idealism which becomes his ‘intellectual philosophy’. And Paul Foot’s Red Shelley (1984) stands out as a work that enacts a sensitive engagement with his politics. Others focus on Shelley’s handling of the language of poetry independent of his politics: William Keach and Michael O’Neill both reject all ‘poststructuralist’ or ‘deconstructionist’ readings of the work. Keach claims that Shelley’s style is ‘the work of an artist whose sense of the unique and unrealised potential in language was held in unstable suspension with its sense of resistance and suspensions’. O’Neill’s study which claims that ‘Shelley’s language is more intent on self-sustaining invention than on allegory’, and that a self–aware reader sensitive to ‘the writer’s consciousness at work in the language’ or being alert to the way that consciousness refuses ‘to codify fluidities and suggestions’. He reads ‘failure’ as not that of language but the poet himself. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie, (ed.) Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 84. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Franz Kafka’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., (ed.) Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 814–15. See for example Terence Allan Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988). Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’ in Shelley’s Prose or Trumpet of a Prophecy ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 172–4. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 73. ‘On Life’, 172. Anne Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), ix. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Prose, 296. Frank B. Evans, ‘Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity’, in Studies in Philology, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October, 1940), 632–40. Shelley: A Critical Reading, 136. ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 72. ‘On Life’, in Shelley’s Prose, 174. Ibid., 174. ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Prose, 297. Paul de Man, Critical Writings, 7. Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 27. ‘A Defence of Poetry’, Shelley’s Prose, 279. ‘An Address to the Irish People’, Shelley’s Prose, 59.

194 Notes 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

‘A Defence of Poetry’, Shelley’s Prose, 279. Ibid., 277. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A Miller, 1759), ii. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (New York: Cosimo, 2006), 65. ‘An Address to the Irish People’ is Kantian in its espousal of universal humanity, pluralist and indifferent to religious belief, and the harmony of universal spirit. It reads disconcertingly like a sermon, but it contains many of the ideas promoted in other prose works, religious tolerance, moral rectitude, equanimity between men in terms of the state, the importance of intellectual non-violent resistance to tyranny, sobriety in intellect and in the body, parsimony, the importance of the development of a public sphere, virtuous and wise action, universal emancipation. Merle A. Williams, ‘Contemplating Facts, Studying Ourselves: Aspects of Shelley’s Philosophical and Religious Prose’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, (ed.) by Alan Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 200. Shelley’s Mythmaking, 3. ‘A Defense of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Prose, 277. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, 192. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 379. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, (ed.) Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2004), 497. Ibid., 522–33. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 2, 494. Christopher Miller, ‘Happily Ever After? The Necessity of Fairytale in Queen Mab’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, 69. Deborah Esch, ‘A Defence of Rhetoric/The Triumph of Reading’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 68. Ibid., 69. ‘Essay on a Future State’, in Shelley’s Prose, 175. Ibid., 177. Shelley: Poetical Works, 14. Shelley: A Critical Reading, 39. The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 11–12. Shelley: Poetical Works, 18. ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, 93–4. ‘Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude’, in Shelley: Poetical Works, 18. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19–20. Jack Benoit Gohn, ‘Did Shelley Know Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell”?’ in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 28, (1979), 20–4. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 351. Ibid., 627. Letters Of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, 735. Ibid., 375.

Notes

195

80 Shelley: Poetical Works, 526. 81 Ibid., 574–5. 82 Steven Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation and Authority (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 69. 83 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, 781. 84 ‘Peter Bell the Third’, in Shelley: Poetical Works, 346. 85 Ibid., 362–3. 86 One early (1965) scholarly edition, for example, is by Donald Reiman. See Donald Reiman, Shelley’s The Triumph of Life: A Critical Study (Champaigne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1965). 87 The history of editing ‘The Triumph of Life’ is detailed in Donald Reiman’s Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” and includes the changes made in Mary Shelley’s three editions as well as the W. M. Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, Harry Buxton Forman, Edward Dowden, George Edward Woodberry, Thomas Hutchinson, C. D. Locock, Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (Julian Edition), and G. N. Matthews. Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”, 118–28. 88 Ibid., 121. 89 Theodor Adorno, ‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’, in Notes to Literature Volume II (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1992), 135–6. 90 Ibid., ‘Preface’, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), ix. 91 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 120. 92 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 121. 93 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 222. 94 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 93. 95 Ibid., 93, 122. 96 Thomas Hardy, ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’, in A Group of Noble Dames, (ed.) David Price (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1920), 64. 97 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 116. 98 Ibid., 117. 99 Shelley: Poetical Works, 507–11. 100 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 94. 101 Shelley: Poetical Works, 18. 102 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 94–5. 103 Ibid., 96. 104 Ibid., 98. 105 Ibid., 98. 106 Shelley: Poetical Works, 517, lines 400–11. 107 Ibid., 100. 108 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 100. 109 In Allegories of Reading de Man spends a good portion of the book exploring the implications of these two different registers in reading Rousseau. 110 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 116. 111 Ibid., 122. 112 Origin, 166. 113 ‘Shelley Disfigured’, 121.

196 Notes

Notes to Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy II (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 153. The Philosophical Discourse of Moderny, 161–84. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), 96–7. Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ‘February 15th or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, in Constellations, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 291. ‘The Resistance to Theory’, in The Resistance to Theory, 10–13. Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–22. Jauss makes the point that prior to the Enlightenment two views of art history prevailed – one which singularly traced the transformation of style in relation to political changes and the other of which proposed plural historical paradigms based on determining contextual factors ascertained from ‘sources of sources’ worked through the lives of authors. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd, 1982), 47–8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 107. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 192. ‘Resistance to Theory’, in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pc/index.htm [accessed August 2010]. In The Positivity of Christian Religion, Hegel claims that Christian Orthodoxy became positive despite Jesus’s opposition to the positivity of Judaism for two reasons: first, because of the need to compromise for the purposes of ingratiating itself with and assimilating itself to Judaism; secondly, the citizens of Greece and the Roman Republic were made self -seeking individuals susceptible to authoritarian rule by the Roman Empire. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 25. Ibid., 26. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 30. Ibid., 3. ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in Aesthetic Ideology, 92. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 104. Francis Fukayama, ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18. George Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press Ltd., 1962), 65. The Philosophical Discorse of Modernity, 143. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 2. Paul de Man, ‘Georg Lukacs’s “Theory of the Novel” ’, in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 52.

Notes

197

27 Ibid., 3. 28 Boris Eichenbaum, ‘Introduction to the Formal Method’, in Literary Theory; An Anthology, eds Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 12. 29 ‘Georg Lukacs’s “Theory of the Novel’, 52. 30 Ibid., 53. 31 ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, in Blindness and Insight, 142. 32 Ibid., 144. 33 Ibid., 148. 34 Ibid., 150. 35 Ibid., 151. 36 Ibid., 153. 37 Ibid., 156. 38 Ibid., 158. 39 ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 261. 40 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 3. 41 Habermas cites Arnold Gehlen and Gottfried Ben as among those who advocate the ‘counting up of supplies’ because modern culture has ‘crystallised’, bringing the history of ideas to a conclusion. He also notes that H. E. Holthusen suggests that Gehlen may have borrowed the term posthistoire from his intellectual ally Hendrik de Man, Paul de Man’s uncle and mentor. The inclusion of this speculation suggests that Habermas thinks the connection is important. However accurate this link might be, in what follows I will clearly distinguish Paul de Man’s thinking from the circle of influences that is here being drawn. 42 Ibid., 3–4. 43 Ibid., 4. 44 ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, 143. 45 De Man’s reading of this polarity in Rousseau is crucial here.

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Index A Defence of Poetry see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Abrams, M. H. 158 absolute idea 14 Academical Questions see Drummond, William Adorno, Theodor 7, 13, 14, 15, 23, 24, 51, 58, 67, 79, 84, 110, 143, 153, 161, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 180, 181, 182, 187, 195, 199, 200, 201, 203, 205, 206 aesthetic 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, 24, 26, 31, 32, 38, 57, 58, 65, 70, 76, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 99, 103, 104, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 123, 134, 137, 138, 143, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 164, 165, 192 Aesthetic Ideology see de Man, Paul aesthetics 10, 11, 14, 39, 57, 62, 69, 76, 86, 95, 96, 101, 109, 111, 114, 117, 123, 125, 127, 150, 152, 153, 157, 158, 163, 179 Aesthetics see Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Agamben, Georgio 51, 52, 67, 94, 181, 188, 199 Agamben, Giorgio 53 agora 4 agoreuein 4 Alastor see Shelley, Percy Bysshe aletheia 37 Allegories of Reading see de Man, Paul allegory 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 33, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 56, 57, 59, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 104, 108, 118, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 157, 168, 184, 193 ‘Allegory’ see Baudelaire, Charles

Althusser, Louis 110 angel of history 19, 30, 86, 172 see also Benjamin, Walter Angel of History see Benjamin, Walter ‘Angelus Novus’ see Klee, Paul d’Annunzio, Gabriele 8 anti-Hegelianism 8 anti-Semitic 13, 48, 150 Apology for Raymond Sebond 84 aporia 151, 152 Appadurai, Arjun 2 The Arcades Project see Benjamin, Walter Archimedes 133 Arciv für Sozialwissenschaften und Socialpolitik 53 Arendt, Hannah 20, 36, 172, 177, 199 Aristotle 4, 34, 35, 66, 69, 99, 173, 177, 199 Arnold, Matthew 128, 129, 192, 197, 199 ‘Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’ see Benjamin, Walter asymptote 109, 122 Atget, Eugène 38 atheism 127, 130, 134, See Shelley, Percy Bysshe Auerbach, Bertholt 28 Aufhebung 24, 45, 120 Augustine 99 aura 15, 25, 37, 38, 72, 173, See Benjamin, Walter d’Aurevilly, Barbey 75, 184 Auschwitz 7, 14 autobiographical poetics see Richter, Gerhard Bachofen, Johann Jakob 48, 49, 50, 180 ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’ see Hardy, Thomas baroque 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 35, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 91, 97

210 Index Battle of the Books see Swift, Jonathan Baudelaire, Charles 11, 13, 22, 26, 27, 30, 40, 47, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 93, 98, 128, 129, 134, 136, 142, 143, 163, 164, 170, 175, 183, 184, 199, 200, 201, 204 Baumgarten, Alexander 117 Beautiful Soul 90 Benbow, William 127 Benjamin, Walter 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 104, 110, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 147, 149, 150, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207 Benn, Gottfried 8 Bergson, Henri 57 Bernstein, Eduard 13, 28, 170, 200 Bible 28, 42 Bibliotheca Eliotae: Eliotes Dictionari see Elyot, Thomas Bildung 28, 31 Bildungsideal see Kant Biographical Literaria see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Blake, William 81 Blanchot, Maurice 8 Blanqui, Louis Auguste 77, 170 Blindness and Insight see de Man, Paul Bloch, Ernst 20, 29, 172, 176 Bloom, Harold 127, 132, 192, 200 Bowie, Andrew 117, 190, 200 Bowles, William Lisle 96 Brasillach, Robert 8 Brecht, Bertolt 3, 11, 127, 128, 175, 192, 199 Bredekamp, Horst 16, 171, 200

Brooks, Cleanth 88, 129, 185, 186, 192, 200, 206 Buber, Martin 14, 20, 29, 30, 31, 84, 127, 132, 176 Buck-Morss, Susan 21, 26, 72, 169, 170, 173, 200 Burckhardt, Jacob 8, 57, 169, 200 Burke, Sean 82, 83, 185, 200 Butler, Marilyn 127, 192, 200 Cahiers du Libre Examen see de Man, Paul Calinescu, Matei 1, 168, 200 Cassirer, Ernst 45, 179, 201 Caygill, Howard 10, 33, 170, 177, 201 Céline, Louis Ferdinand 8 The Cenci see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Cicero 99 classical idealism 11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 69, 95, 96, 127 Comintern 9 commissarial dictatorship see Agamben, Giorgio; Schmitt, Carl ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘The Concept of Irony’ see de Man, Paul ‘The Concept of Time in the Science of History’ see Heidegger, Martin Condillac, Étienne 100, 101, 102 ‘Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique’ see Habermas, Jürgen Cooper, Thomas 4 The Concept of the Political see Schmitt, Carl Cornelius, Hans 57 Course in General Linguistics see Saussure, Ferdinand de Cowen, Bainard 39 Creuzer, Friedrich 70, 183 critical theory 1, 24, 26, 151 Critical Writings see de Man, Paul ‘Criticism and Crisis’ see de Man, Paul Critique of Judgement see Kant, Immanuel Critique of Practical Reason see Kant, mmanuel Critique of Pure Reason 34, 110, 167, 177, 203 see also Kant, Immanuel ‘Critique of Violence’ see Benjamin, Walter

Index cultural criticism 14 Cysarz, Herbert 70 Darnton, Robert 97, 188 Das Wort 128 ‘Dead Author’ theory see Burke, Sean death 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 32, 47, 48, 50, 52, 63, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 84, 87, 92, 94, 107, 116, 125, 126, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 147, 149, 171, 173, 186 death’s head (Totenkopf) see death Deborin, Abram 9 decisionism 51, 56, 57 see also Schmitt, Carl deconstruction 1, 7, 10, 81, 82, 144, 150, 151 Defoe, Daniel 97 Deism 102 de Man, Hendrik 16, 17, 81 de Man, Paul 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 23, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 131, 134, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207 Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele see Klages, Ludwig Der Jude see Buber, Martin Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen [The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual see Schmitt, Carl Derrida, Jacques 50, 53, 56, 61, 70, 79, 92, 150, 151, 153, 167, 176, 180, 181, 182, 185, 187, 196, 200, 201, 202, 203 Descartes, René 1, 34, 153, 158 Dialectic of the Enlightenment See Theodor Adorno; Max Horkheimer Dictatorship see Schmitt, Carl

211

Die deutsche Juristenzeitung see Schmitt, Carl Die literatische Welt see Walter Benjamin Dilthey, Wilhelm 20, 57, 172, 179 ‘Doctrine of the Similar’ see Benjamin, Walter Drieu La Rochelle Pierre 8 Droysen, Johann 57 Drummond, William 129 Drumont, Edouard 78 Düttmann, Alexander García 40, 201 Eagleton, Terry 23, 113, 116, 117, 123, 174, 185, 190, 201 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 76, 184, 201 Elyot, Thomas 4 empiricism 11, 45 Encyclopedia see Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich end of history see messianism ‘England in 1819’ see Shelley, Percy Bysshe enlightenment 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 24, 27, 28, 30, 36, 40, 77, 86, 99, 100, 103, 117, 133, 153, 158, 179 enmity between Christians and Jews 31 ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’ see de Man, Paul ‘Essay on a Future State’ see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Eternity through the Stars see Blanqui, Louis Auguste ethos 74, 150, 152, 153, 175 Europe 3, 7, 8, 11, 17, 26, 67, 89, 91, 168, 169, 171, 196, 201, 207 European nihilism 8 The Excursion see Wordsworth, William ‘Experience’ 40, 174 see Benjamin, Walter faces hippocratica of history see Benjamin, Walter the Fall see Genesis The Fall of Hyperion see Keats, John fascism 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 24, 27, 37, 38, 150, 175, 186 Fascism 7, 13, 49, 56, 169, 180, 182, 204, 207 ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common

212 Index Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’ 151 Feenberg, Andrew 2, 168, 202 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 117, 119, 121, 122 film 25, 37, 38, 73, 150 Firchow, Peter 118, 190, 206 Flaubert, Gustave 91 Fletcher, Angus 4, 168, 202 Fleurs du Mal see Baudelaire, Charles Form and Intent in the American New Criticism’ see de Man, Paul ‘Forward to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony’ see de Man, Paul Fraistat, Neil 126, 127, 191, 194, 202, 205 Frankfurt School 15, 16, 25, 26, 57, 170, 186, 206 Freideutsche Jugend see Benjamin, Walter Fromm, Eric 29 Frye, Northrop 92, 168, 202 Fukayama, Francis 158, 196, 202 Gadamer, Hans Georg 20, 95, 188, 202 Gallican articles 66 Gasché, Rudolphe 82, 83, 108, 185, 189, 202 Gazette de Charleroi see de Man, Hendrik ‘Gedanken Űber Gerhart Hauptmanns Festspiel’ see Benjamin, Walter Genesis see Bible Gentile, Giovanni 8 geometry 104, 151 George, Stephan 22, 23, 27, 28, 52, 53, 55, 57, 76, 169, 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 195, 196, 200, 204, 206 Germanistik 39, 69, 95 German-Jewish Bildung see Judaism Giddens, Anthony 2, 168, 202 Giehlow, Karl 71 Godwin, William 130, 193, 202 Goebbels, Joseph 8, 113, 150 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 28 Goethe, Wolfgand von 39, 45, 47, 60, 62, 70, 178, 179, 201, 202 Goldmann, Lucien 36, 177 Gorres, Joseph von 70

de Graph, Ortwin 81 Gubser, Mike 57, 202 Guillaume de Lorris 97 Guillroy, John 81 Güntert, Hermann 63, 182, 204 Guyer, Paul 103, 189, 202 Habermas, Jürgen philosophical discourse of modernity 1, 153 Habermas, Jürgen 1, 11, 16, 24, 25, 26, 78, 85, 88, 113, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 196, 197, 201, 202, 203 Hägglund, Martin 92, 187, 202 Halmi, Nicholas 39, 178, 202 Hamann, Johann Georg 21, 40, 202 Hamlet see Shakespeare, William Hamlet or Hecuba see Schmitt, Carl Hardy, Thomas 144, 146, 195 Hartman, Geoffrey 126, 185, 187, 191, 200 Hasidic tradition see Judaism Haskala see Judaism Hazlitt, William 96, 128 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1, 47, 64, 83, 88, 98, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 121, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 167, 189, 190, 196, 203, 206 ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ see de Man, Paul Heidegger, Martin 8, 9, 13, 20, 26, 33, 36, 37, 38, 83, 153, 169, 177, 178, 201, 203, 204, 206 hermeneutics 93, 165 Herzl, Theodore 29 Het Vlaamsche Land see de Man, Paul; Benjamin, Walter Hieroglyphica see Horapollen Hindenburg, Paul von 15 history 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 36, 37, 39, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 87, 88, 93, 96, 98, 99, 110, 114, 117, 119, 121, 126, 131, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168, 172, 174, 177, 195, 196, 197

Index History and Class Consciousness 36, 72, 169, 181, 204 see also Lukács, Georg Hitler, Adolf 7, 50, 171, 183, 184, 202, 203, 206 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 75 Hölderlin, Friedrich 40, 41, 45, 47, 88, 131, 143, 172, 178, 179, 195, 206 Homo Ludens see Huizinga, Johan Horapollon 71 Horkheimer, Max 13, 14, 153, 170, 175, 203 Huizinga, Johan 92, 187, 203 human sensorium 5, 38, 65, 66, 85, 88, 126, 149 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 57 Hume, David 34, 130, 193, 194, 202 Hunt, Leigh 140, 141 Husserl, Edmund 57, 91, 187 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty see Shelley, Percy Bysshe hypotyposis 101, 102, 103 identity thinking 14 ideological critique see Habermas, Jürgen Illuminations see Benjamin, Walter Institut für Sozialforschung [Institute for Social Research] 14 intellectual beauty see Shelley, Percy Bysshe intellectual recklessness 17 ‘The Inward Generation’ see de Man, Paul inwardness 7, 75, 83, 84, 88, 96, 160 irony 11, 43, 45, 86, 97, 98, 104, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 139, 157, 160 Jameson, Fredric 4, 5, 7, 168, 169, 203 Jauss, Hans Robert 1, 22, 76, 77, 167, 173, 184, 196, 203 Jay, Martin 64, 170, 186, 200 Jetztzeit see time Jewish Kabbalistic thought see Judaism ‘Johann Jacob Bachofen’ see Benjamin, Walter John Locke, personal identity 1 Jones, Sir William 127, 195

213

Judaism 14, 26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 175, 176, 196, 203, 204 Jugenstil 74, 75, 100 Julian and Maddalo see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse see Rousseau, Jean Jacques Jünger, Ernst 8, 50 Kaiser Wilhelm II 23 Kant, Immanuel 1, 10, 26, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 47, 48, 49, 54, 92, 95, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 131, 153, 155, 157, 167, 177, 179, 189, 190, 200, 201, 202, 203 ‘Kant’s Distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime’ see Guyer, Paul Kantian enlightenment see Kant, Immanuel Keats, John 3, 81, 96, 137, 141, 168, 194, 202, 204 Kelley, Teresa 125, 191, 203 Kermode, Frank 23 Kierkegaard, Søren 98, 120, 121 Kirchheimer, Otto 16 Klages, Ludwig 13, 20, 26, 47, 48, 49, 50, 174, 176, 179, 203, 207 Klee, Paul 19, 22, 23, 173 Knowledge and Human Interests see Habermas, Jürgen Kosmogonis und Eros see Klages, Ludwig Kunstwollen 58, 65, 75, 127, 180, 181, 205 see Reigl, Alois; Benjamin, Walter L’Esprit des bêtes: Zoologie passionnelle – Mammifères de France see Toussenel, Alphonse Labriola, Antonio 25 Lang, Fritz 150 language 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 55, 57, 60, 63, 64, 67, 69, 73, 75, 78, 83, 84, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119,

214 Index 121, 122, 123, 126, 130, 131, 134, 137, 143, 144, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 164, 165, 173, 175, 193 language as act 134 language as figuration 134 The Late Roman Art Industry see Reigl, Alois law of identity see Benjamin, Walter Le Soir see de Man, Paul Leavis, F. R. 129, 192, 203 Lebensphilosophie see Klages, Ludwig Lefabvre, Henry 143 Lehman, David 82, 185, 203 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 1, 34, 64 Les Fleurs du mal 75, 76, 184 Letters on Aesthetic Education see Schiller, Friedrich The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol see Schmitt, Carl Levinson, Marjorie 3, 168, 204 liberal democracy 8, 15, 28, 158 liberal humanist 8, 123 Liberalism 8, 201 ‘The Life of Students’ 30, 33, 40, 49, 176, 177 see Benjamin, Walter The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Letters 128 Locke, John 1, 33, 34, 98, 99, 100, 101, 109, 157, 167, 204 logic see Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich logos 41, 61, 112, 153 Long, Christopher 36, 38, 171, 178, 204 Löwy, Michael 22, 24, 25, 26, 36, 167, 174, 204 Lucinde see Schlegel, Friedrich Lucis, Asja 72 Lukács, Georg 9, 12, 29, 36, 39, 48, 58, 72, 110, 158, 159, 160, 169, 170, 177, 179, 181, 204, 207 Luxemburg, Rosa 25 Maimonides 28, 176 Mallarmé, Yeats, and the Post-Romantic Predicament see de Man, Paul ‘Manifeste Aux Members Du Parti Ouvrier Belge’ see de Man, Hendrik

Männerbund see Wyneken, Gustav Marcuse, Herbert 24, 25, 113 Marinetti, Filippo 8 Marx, Karl 1, 16, 28, 64, 110, 152, 153, 167, 184, 186, 193, 200, 203, 204 The Mask of Anarchy see Shelley, Percy Bysshe materialism 12, 24, 25, 81, 117, 130, 133 materialist historiography 14, 37, 61, 73, 74, 77, 78, 137 Materials on the History of the Theory of Colors see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von The Meaning of Literature see Weiss, Timothy medieval Christian allegory see allegory melancholy 11, 30, 37, 43, 67, 68, 73, 77, 90, 94, 125, 129 ‘Mench und Erde’ see Klages, Ludwig Mendelssohn, Moses 27, 28 ‘The Mendelssohn’s Der Mensch in der Handscrift see Mendelssohn, Moses Menshevik politics 9 messianism 10, 12, 28, 29, 79 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe see White, Hayden meta-language 90, 107 metaphor 4, 70, 73, 89, 92, 100, 101, 107, 111, 112, 119, 122, 125, 128, 129, 146 Metaphor 99, 100, 103, 189, 205 ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’ see Benjamin, Walter Metropolis see Lang, Fritz Meyer, Eduard 36 mimesis 11, 111 modern allegory see allegory modernity 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 40, 47, 52, 65, 75, 77, 78, 87, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 175, 176 as an ‘unfinished project’ see Habermas, Jürgen Mont Blanc see Shelley, Percy Bysshe ‘Montaigne and Transcendence’ see de Man Paul

Index Moore, Thomas 141 Moscow Diary see Benjamin, Walter Mosès, Stéphane 31, 176, 204 Mosse, George 28, 175, 204 mourning 52, 57, 59, 66, 68, 69, 90, 130 Moynihan, Robert 92, 187 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 139 myth 4, 13, 46, 50, 55, 70 name 2, 4, 14, 20, 38, 41, 42, 43, 54, 59, 60, 63, 64, 68, 79, 81, 86, 90, 91, 105, 106, 107, 116, 121, 122, 137, 154, 176, 179 naming 41, 42, 44, 46, 63, 90, 91, 92, 107 National Socialism 14, 27, 74, 88 Nazis 2, 16, 17, 50, 91, 150, 171, 173 neo-Kantian metaphysics see Kant, Immanuel Neumann, Franz 16 New Criticism 84 The New World of English Words see Phillips, Edward ‘News about Flowers’ see Benjamin, Walter Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 8, 20, 47, 57, 81, 153, 154, 155, 156, 161, 162, 163, 169, 172, 179, 190, 200, 204, 207 noiesis and aisthesis see Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Norris, Christopher 1, 28, 82, 91, 103, 167, 176, 185, 187, 189, 204 Nouvelle revue française 50 Novalis 118, 119, 179 Ode to the West Wind see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Of Grammatology see Derrida, Jacques ‘Of the Sublime’ see Schiller, Friedrich ‘Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life’ see Nietzsche, Friedrich ‘On Incomprehensibility’ see Schlegel, Friedrich ‘On Language and Language as Such’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On Life’ see Shelley, Percy Bysshe

215

‘On Perception’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On the Concept of History’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On the Present Social Position of the French Writer’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy’ see Benjamin, Walter ‘On the Uselessness of Mathematics for Assuring the Stability of Buildings’ see Viel, Charles François ontological crisis 88, 165 The Origin of German Tragic Drama 22, 32, 36, 39, 40, 47, 50, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 72, 74, 84, 87, 94, 95, 139, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 182, 200 see also Benjamin, Walter ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ see Heidegger, Martin Osborne, Peter 1, 93, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 184, 188, 200, 205 overnaming 43, 67, 84, 90, 130 Paine, Thomas 133 parataxis 143 Pascal, Blaise 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 157, 189 ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion’ see de Man, Paul Passagen-Werk see Benjamin, Walter Peirce, Charles Sanders 109 Pensées see de Man, Paul performativity 2, 5, 7, 92, 103, 109, 149, 162 Peter Bell the Third see Shelly, Percy Bysshe; Brecht, Holt Phaedrus see Plato Phenomenology of Mind see Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’ see de Man, Paul Phillips, Edward 4 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 150

216 Index ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ see Shelley, Percy Bysshe ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’ see Husserl, Edmund photography 37, 38, 76 The Pilgrim’s Progress 5 Plato 28, 33, 46, 63, 99, 165, 176 poetic task 45, 46 poeticised 46 Poetics see Aristotle poetry 2, 14, 18, 26, 30, 41, 48, 58, 63, 75, 76, 77, 88, 89, 93, 96, 109, 111, 118, 123, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135, 142, 143, 145, 191, 193 ‘Poet’s Courage’ see Hölderlin, Friedrich the political see Schmitt political Catholicism see Schmitt, Carl Political Romanticism see Schmitt, Carl Political Theology see Schmitt, Carl politics 8, 168, 169, 171, 173, 178, 180, 182, 185, 199, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207 Pope, Alexander 30, 140 Posthumous Poems see Shelley, Mary postmodernism 4, 5, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24, 153, 168, 169 post-Saussurean linguistics 90 Pound, Ezra 8 praxis, 13, 24, 37, 85, 108, 152 principle of sovereignty 47 Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament see Reigl, Alois ‘Problems in the Sociology of Language’ see Benjamin, Walter progress 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19, 21, 22, 28, 29, 48, 49, 72, 77, 86, 89, 90, 143, 152, 159, 164 Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Morals see Kant Prometheus Unbound see Shelley, Percy Bysshe prosopopoeia 40, 113, 126, 147 Proust, Marcel 15, 91, 122 The Psychology of Socialism see de Man, Hendrik quadrivium 151 Queen Mab see Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Quessel, Ludwig 28, 175, 205 Quintillian 4, 99 radical atheism 92 Rang, Florens 31, 32, 57 Ranke, Leopold von 57 reading 1, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, 21, 23, 28, 29, 33, 38, 40, 47, 53, 61, 67, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 82, 87, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 177, 187, 195, 197 redemptive critique see Habermas, Jürgen Redfield, Marc 17, 83, 171, 185, 205 Reflexions see Pascal, Blaise Reiman, Donald 146, 177, 194, 195, 205 religion 5, 8, 28, 29, 41, 42, 58, 63, 78, 94, 116, 118, 119, 134, 155, 156, 176 ‘Review of Bernoulli’s Bachofen’ see Benjamin, Walter Reynolds, John Hamilton 140 rhetoric 12, 83, 90, 91, 95, 99, 102, 104, 109, 110, 118, 126, 149, 151, 153, 160 The Rhetoric of Romanticism see de Man, Paul ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ see de Man, Paul, See de Man, Paul Richter, Gerhard 51, 72, 180, 183, 205 Richter, John Paul 118 Ricoeur, Paul 99, 189, 205 Riegl, Alois 20, 57, 58, 59, 65, 66, 87, 104, 180, 181, 182, 202, 205 ‘To the River Itchen’ see Bowles, William Lisle ‘To the River Otter’ see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Robinson Crusoe see Defoe, Daniel ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ 40, 57 see Benjamin, Walter Roman de la rose see Guillaume de Lorris romantic 9, 11, 39, 45, 47, 69, 70, 72, 81, 90, 91, 95, 96, 97, 100, 111, 118, 120, 123, 143, 152, 158, 160, 164

Index romanticism 5, 8, 51, 66, 71, 72, 81, 87, 96, 97, 143, 145, 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 164, 175 Rosalind and Helen see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Rosenzweig, Franz 20, 29, 31, 176, 178, 201, 204 Rosiek, Jan 89, 94, 187, 188, 206 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 96, 97, 125, 144, 146, 147, 153, 179, 188, 195, 197, 201 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 88 Rudas, Ladislaus 9 Rules for the Direction of the Mind see Descartes, René Saussure, Ferdinand de 40, 41, 109, 151, 153 Schiller, Friedrich 28, 92, 98, 113, 114, 115, 116, 153, 157, 190 Schlegel, Friedrich 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 179, 190, 206 Schmitt, Carl 8, 13, 15, 16, 20, 26, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 66, 67, 68, 81, 94, 170, 171, 174, 176, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 201, 205, 206 Scholem, Gershom 23, 24, 29, 31, 33, 36, 49, 60, 67, 74, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182, 187, 199, 200, 204, 206 Schopenhauer, Arthur 70 Second Empire of Napoleon III 74 The Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism see Wolin, Richard Sein und Zeit see Heidegger, Martin Selbstverhülltheit see Husserl, Edmund Seligson, Carla 33 ‘The Seven Old Men’ see Baudelaire, Charles Shakespeare, William 141 Shelley, Mary 18, 127, 141, 143 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 18, 81, 96, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 171, 185, 191, 192,

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193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207 Shelley, Timothy 127 ‘Shelley Disfigured’ see de Man, Paul ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’ see de Man, Paul Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man see Lehman, David Sklovskij, Victor 160 Smith, Adam 132, 167, 174, 177, 180, 193, 194, 195, 200, 203, 204, 206 ‘The Socialist and Bolshevik Theory of the State’ see Kirchheimer Socrates 48, 106 Sokal affair 82 Solger, Karl 118 Sontag, Susan 20, 172, 206 Sorel, George 53, 55 Southey, Robert 141 sovereign dictatorship see Agamben, Giorgio; Schmitt, Carl sovereignty 26, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74, 77, 131, 132, 134, 140 speech act theory 110 Spencer, Lloyd 21, 173 Spinoza, Baruch 28, 117, 176, 189, 204 state of exception 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 67, 94, 95 State of Exception see Agamben, Giorgio The Statues see Yeats, William Butler Steiner, George 22, 23, 27, 57, 174, 175, 177, 206 Stendhal 91 Strauss, Leo 28, 32 Strauss, Ludwig 28, 29, 30, 175, 176, 206 Strong, Tracey 52, 180, 181, 201 structuralism 91, 92, 93, 153 subjectivity 1, 20, 24, 37, 58, 85, 86, 87, 92, 97, 117, 118, 120, 152, 164, 186 sublime 68, 91, 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 173 Swift, Jonathan 152, 196, 206 symbol 19, 22, 39, 43, 69, 70, 71, 72, 95, 96, 97, 110, 112, 126, 157, 158, 173 Symposium see Plato Szondi, Peter

218 Index task 5, 20, 30, 33, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 56, 57, 62, 63, 76, 90, 91, 131, 137, 149, 150, 158, 177 ‘The Task of the Translator’ 43, 76, 179, 197 see Benjamin, Walter technology 2, 26, 27, 39, 41, 48, 50, 72, 73, 74, 75, 88, 149, 153 temporality 3, 9, 21, 25, 27, 36, 49, 59, 64, 65, 67, 70, 72, 73, 74, 86, 89, 93, 111, 114, 126, 140, 145, 160, 161, 164, 179 Teskey, Gordon 3, 4, 5, 168, 206 Theory of Communicative Action see Habermas, Jürgen Theory of the Novel see Lukács, Georg ‘Theories of German Fascism’ see Benjamin, Walter Theses on the Philosophy of History see Benjamin, Walter Third Reich see Hitler, Adolf Three Speeches to the Jews see Buber, Martin Tieck, Ludwig 118, 122 time 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 96, 97, 105, 106, 107, 123, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 149, 155, 160, 161, 163, 170, 171, 173, 175, 184 time and history 20, 22, 58, 65, 125, 137, 149 ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’ see de Man, Paul ‘Timidity’ see Hölderlin, Friedrich totalitarianism 7 Toussenel, Alphonse 78, 185, 206 transcendence 8, 10, 11, 47, 66, 67, 69, 71, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 96, 116, 123 translation 20, 35, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 52, 64, 75, 84, 94, 95, 100, 102, 128, 163, 175, 182, 184 ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ see Benjamin, Walter

The Triumph of Life see Shelley, Percy Bysshe trivium 151, 153 Truth and Method see Gadamer, Hans Georg ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’ see Benjamin, Walter Universalpoesie see Schlegel, Friedrich Verfassungslehre see Schmitt, Carl Victorian market see Victorian society Victorian society 18 Viel, Charles François 74 Viesel, Hansjörg 53 Voltaire 133, 146 Von der Sprache der Götter und Geister see Guntert, Hermann Walter Benjamin’s Archive see Benjamin, Walter War and Warriors see Jünger, Ernst Warburg Institute 57 Warminski, Andrzej 110, 113, 185, 190, 201, 206 Wasserman, Earl 96, 127, 130, 135, 158, 188, 192, 193, 206 Waters, Lindsay 82, 84, 168, 185, 186, 187, 190, 194, 201, 207 Weber, Samuel 20, 52, 163, 172, 174, 180, 199, 207 Weimar constitution see Schmitt, Carl; Weimar Republic Weimar Republic 15, 26, 27, 53, 55 Weiss, Timothy 158 ‘Weite und Vielfalt der realistischen Schreibweise’ (‘Range and Diversity of the Realist Literary Mode’) see Brecht, Bertolt Weltgeschictlichte Betrachtugen (Reflections on History) see Jacob Burckhardt Wheatley, Kim 18, 171, 207 White, Hayden 3, 7, 168, 169, 207 will to art see Kunstwollen ‘will to change’ 87, 129 Wimsatt, William 92, 96, 188, 207 Witte, Bernd 12, 169, 170, 207 Wölfflin, Heinrich 57

Index Wolin, Richard 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 33, 64, 150, 169, 170, 177, 207 Wordsworth, William 84, 96, 137, 140, 141, 146, 194, 202 ‘To Wordsworth’ see Shelley, Percy Bysshe Wroe, Anne 130, 193 Wyneken, Gustav 29, 47, 175

Yeats, Wiliam Butler 8, 70, 82, 146 Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung see Institutue for Social Research Zionism 28, 30, 31, 175 see Judaism Zivilisation 48

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