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Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method Abstract The now-longstanding academic revival of allegory, as well as its import as a perennial buzzword of contemporary art criticism, owes much to a group of essays published in the journal October in the early 1980s. Authors Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloh, in turn, drew a bloodline to the ideas of allegory that occupied Walter Benjamin throughout his literary career. However, whereas Benjamin saw allegory as the expression of a radical, indeed messianic, view of political possibility, the October writers found in allegory a counter-paradigm against Modernism that would resist the latter's totalizing tendencies by pursing its own deconstructive fate of “lack of transcendence.” In the following essay, I trace the source of this discrepancy to the crucial theological underpinnings of Benjamin's concept of allegory, without which the allegorical forms - appropriation and montage - produce not miraculous flashes of unmediated recognition but the permanent impossibility of communication. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American, British and Canadian Studies Journal de Gruyter

Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

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References (8)

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by the
ISSN
1841-964X
eISSN
1841-964X
DOI
10.1515/abcsj-2015-0007
Publisher site
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Abstract

Abstract The now-longstanding academic revival of allegory, as well as its import as a perennial buzzword of contemporary art criticism, owes much to a group of essays published in the journal October in the early 1980s. Authors Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloh, in turn, drew a bloodline to the ideas of allegory that occupied Walter Benjamin throughout his literary career. However, whereas Benjamin saw allegory as the expression of a radical, indeed messianic, view of political possibility, the October writers found in allegory a counter-paradigm against Modernism that would resist the latter's totalizing tendencies by pursing its own deconstructive fate of “lack of transcendence.” In the following essay, I trace the source of this discrepancy to the crucial theological underpinnings of Benjamin's concept of allegory, without which the allegorical forms - appropriation and montage - produce not miraculous flashes of unmediated recognition but the permanent impossibility of communication.

Journal

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 1, 2015

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