Romancing Fascism

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

Kathleen Kerr-Koch
 Bloomsbury Academic
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Kathleen Kerr-Koch, 2013

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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 brothels 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 Moslems 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 bodys 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 ix
Preface xi
Introduction: Modernity and the Allegoric 1

1 Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion 7

2 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History: Walter Benjamins
Allegory 19
3 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 81
4 How to do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 125
5 Conclusions: Criticism as Enlightened Deconstruction 149

Notes 167
Bibliography 199
Index 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 contemp-
tuous 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 allegorys 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 multi-
faceted 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. Lwy 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 Pguy 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 Lwy and Sayer have in pinning down the character of revolu-
tionary 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 xiii

distinction to be made between a tendency towards irrationalism and the rehabili-

tation of nonrational and/or nonrationalizable behaviors4 without precluding rational
thought. Shelleys 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 Jrgen Habermas, my final chapter suggests a
way forward for a discourse caught in the resultant impasse between critical-ration-
alist 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 perni-
cious 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 Jausss view, citations
initiate the repetition of the process of question and answer in the light of an histori-
cally 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 Lockes noogony
or sensualised concepts of the understanding and Leibnitzs intellectualised
appearances4 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 Marxs 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 Kants 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 Osbornes view of modernity as primarily a temporal concept
2 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 Universitt
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 fr Sozialforschung he
was in possession of a visa for the United States.
Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Shelleys 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 Whites 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,
4 Romancing Fascism

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 repre-
sented 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 allegorys 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.
Teskeys 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 opera-
tions: 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 Shelleys 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 psycho-
logical 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 5

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
Jamesons interest is in the dynamics of resistance to the hegemonic, the dissemi-
nating, 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 Pilgrims 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 poets 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.
 1

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 antag-
onism, 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 precon-
dition 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 Adornos 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.
Adornos categorical imperative to rearrange thought and action has inspired many
attempts to work out the intellectual origins of modernitys 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
8 Romancing Fascism

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 Wolins 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. Burckhardts anti-
Hegelianism 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 Wolins
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 fascisms literary and philosophical
sympathisers, a very mixed group including Ernst Jnger, Gottfried Benn, Carl
Schmitt, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Ezra
Pound, Giovanni Gentile, Filippo Marinetti, Gabriele dAnnunzio, W. B. Yeats and
Wyndham Lewis.8
Burckhardts closeness to Nietzsche puts him in the downward trajectory that
Wolin describes: both subscribe to the view that the rise of democracy had precipi-
tated Athens downfall.9 Having said that, it must also be noted that Burckhardt also
plays a substantial role in the formulation of Walter Benjamins 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. Burckhardts 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 metanar-
ratives 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
 Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion 9

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 indis-
pensable 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 Heideggers 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 counter-
revolution, 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 Wolins, 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, irrespon-
sible intellectuals in the development of a singular form of thinking. And they often
do this at their peril, as in the case of Lukcs, 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. Lukcs 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 retali-
ation, however, was never published in his lifetime. Moreover, with the discovery of
the defence, the image of Lukcs 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 modernitys 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 politi-
cally. 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
10 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 Wolins allegory of decline.
For Benjamin, the concept of baroque allegory critically reconfigures enlight-
enment 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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, Benjamins 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
Mans 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
 Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion 11

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 industri-
alising 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 Benjamins 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 Mans 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 Benjamins later thinking about
allegory, also inspired de Mans 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 Mans 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
Benjamins Trauerspiel, which is born out of an apprehension of captivity, the impos-
sibility 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 politi-
cisation of his aesthetics, and for what drew his work to Benjamin and appealed to
Brecht. De Mans 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 Shelleys 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
Wolins narrative of modernitys decline and recovery, derived as it is from Jrgen
Habermass view of modernity as an unfinished project, stays poised in a laudable
defence of a well-meaning enlightenment political philosophy. The problem is,
12 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 Wolins 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 Benjamins
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 unrec-
ognisably 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
Wolins 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 Mans 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 Mans
work carries forward this critique potentiating, but also secularising, Benjamins work
more explicitly at the level of rhetoric.
Thus de Mans recuperation of Benjamins 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
Lukcs leads Benjamin to the path of materialism, methodologically and in the
conceptualisation of goals the two are very different: while the former is more scien-
tifically systematic, the latter prefers to win the powers of intoxication for the
revolution.28 This difference between the aesthetic realism of Lukcs 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 capitu-
lation to dysfunctionalism, which would put Benjamins theological and hashish-fired
intoxication in a much healthier transformative light.29 Having said that, however,
making Lukcs the blind one and valorising Benjamins insight into the importance of
 Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion 13

a more poetic model of critique is a move that must carry with it important qualifica-
tions, which Wolin does not entirely address. Benjamins 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 Klagess, 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 liber-
ating nature, and then uses liberated nature as a totalising concept which rationalises
the objectifying, reifying process:
For dominations bloody purposes the creature is only material. Thus the Fhrer
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
14 Romancing Fascism

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 its 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 Adornos theoretical work
is that
[n]on identity thinking (negative dialectics) resists the compulsion to identifi-
cation 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 Benjamins
thought with that of Adorno and the Institut fr Sozialforschung [Institute for Social
Research]. Benjamins 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 fr
Sozialforschung, the Institutes journal. But the relationship was fraught with tension
not only due to Max Horkheimers 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 Benjamins ascetic style which attempted to consolidate
theology (Judaism) with a materialist historiography. Benjamins 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
 Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion 15

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.
Adornos 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 interpre-
tation 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 constitu-
tional 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
16 Romancing Fascism

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 intel-
lectuals 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 Schmitts 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 liber-
alism. 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 youth45 but this dismissal does not register the way in which Kirchheimer and
Neumann may have contributed to Schmitts 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 intel-
lectuals in Germany and abroad.46 Eventually, Benjamin, Kirchheimer and Neumann,
when the political consequences of Schmitts 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 Mans 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
 Critical Limits and Allegorical Contagion 17

were part of the Flemish bourgeoisie: established, highly educated, multilingual and
cultured. As a socialist, Hendrik was an idealist and critical of Marxisms 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 prole-
tarian 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 nephews own wartime journalism. In Manifeste Aux Members Du Parti Ouvrier
Belge48 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 Mans 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 compro-
mises in the hope of preserving a degree of autonomy.50 De Man was very likely
motivated by his uncles idealism, his uncles 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
18 Romancing Fascism

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 monumen-
talisation in Shelleys 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 Benjamins 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 deaths head.
And although such a thing lacks all symbolic freedom of expression, all classical
proportion, all humanity nevertheless, this is the form in which mans 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 Flgel ist zum Schwung bereit,

Ich kehrte gern zurck,
Den blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
Ich htte wenig Glck.
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
20 Romancing Fascism

The above epigraphs, taken from Benjamins The Origin of German Tragic Drama
and On the Concept of History respectively, represent moments in the trajectory of
Benjamins 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 diffi-
culties. 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 subjectivity8 and a theorist who
prepared the ground for postmodernism.
As these cryptic statements perhaps suggest, Benjamins 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 convo-
luted tactics required to access his thought, however, Benjamins 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 modernity10: 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 trans-
formation/translation under the conditions of modernity. Benjamins 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, philoso-
phers, theorists and critics Riegl, Buber, Rosenzweig, Klages, Schmitt, to name a
few reading dialectically and against the grain of institutionalised categories in the
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 21

development of a singular approach to the political, historical and aesthetic configu-

ration 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 postmod-
ernism-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 Hamanns 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, Benjamins 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 disinte-
gration.13 Lloyd Spencer argues that, [w]hereas allegory generally sacrifices internal
coherence of representation to the marked signification of an other order, Benjamins
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. Benjamins 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
22 Romancing Fascism

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 Benjamins 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 appear-
ances 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 deaths 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, quantita-
tively 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 Klees20 1920 painting Anglus Novus.21
Benjamin interprets Klees 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 Lwy 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 signifi-
cance of the angel to Benjamins 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 repre-
sentative of ulterior meanings, and, therefore, unreal in itself, can render bearable
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 23

an authentic perception of the infernal. Through allegory, the Angel, who in Paul
Klees depiction, Angelus Novus, plays so obsessive a part in Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Klees 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 Benjamins response to Scholems
giving voice to the angel was polite: the language of angels, he said, has the disad-
vantage 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins true affinities were theological (Scholem)
24 Romancing Fascism

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
(Lwy). Scholem maintained that Benjamins 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 Habermass huge contribution to the question of what constitutes an appro-
priate 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 distin-
guishes 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 Benjamins 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
Benjamins short-circuited critique with Herbert Marcuses 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 Marcuses 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, Benjamins 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 sacri-
ficing of its status as a work of art to its reception. Juxtaposing painting, which invites
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 25

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 alter-
native suggestive resynthesisation.
Habermas points out four important differences between Marcuses and Benjamins
critiques: In the first instance, Marcuses 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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
Habermass 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 cant be hidden behind a monks 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 monks cowl approach has rendered Benjamins 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 Lwy takes issue with Habermass 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
26 Romancing Fascism

of the dangers contained in modernity; and finally, all Marxisms, evolutionary or

non-evolutionary, critique domination and the Frankfurt Schools own critique of
domination was no doubt influenced by Benjamin.39 Thus, Lwy affirms the political
value of Benjamins thought for critical theory, and claims that however idiosyncratic
Benjamins style, his work leads to an entirely novel conception of human history.40
While these are credible arguments and supported here, it cant be forgotten that
Habermas is aware of the fact that Benjamins thinking emerges partly as a result of a
dialectical interlocution with such dubious counter-revolutionary figures as Ludwig
Klages and Carl Schmitt, in particular Klagess cosmology and Schmitts 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
techn) or materialises images that make history recognisable. Before embarking on
an analysis of Benjamins 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 sicle context
violence and a ferment of intellectual activity is fundamental to the development of
Benjamins thought and understanding of allegory; his own biopolitical positioning in
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 27

the European context allowed for a particular kind of insight. That is to say, his under-
standing 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 Benjamins 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. Benjamins
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 impli-
cation in the rise of fascism.
Benjamin was born into an assimilated, secularised, wealthy bourgeois German-
Jewish 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-industri-
alised, 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 trans-
formations 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 Benjamins
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
28 Romancing Fascism

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
Quessels 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 Strausss 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 Platos 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 29

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 Lukcs, all of with
whom Benjamin was familiar, embraced messianism of this form.
Martin Buber was a key influence for German-Jewish intellectuals of Benjamins
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 Herzls 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 Bubers Judaism as
one of presence, built on process as opposed to being merely a historical religion.55
Rabinbach dates Benjamins first confrontation with the challenge of Bubers call
for self-definition to 1912, based on letters between himself and Ludwig Strauss,56
Bubers 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, Bubers
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
30 Romancing Fascism

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 preoccu-
pation. 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 spirit-
lessness (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 uncompre-
hended 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 Bubers 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 31

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 Stphane Moss 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
Benjamins 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 Bubers 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
[languages] 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. Benjamins reservations about a committed or overtly politi-
cised 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:
32 Romancing Fascism

an acknowledgement of the coming Christian centuries and peoples was

imposed upon the Old Testament by the oldest Christian churches and
congregations. This was, of course, originally done in the hope of wresting
the Old Testament from the Jews, and without an awareness of the historical
consequences, since people live in anticipation of the imminent end. Because
of this, universal and historical enmity of Christians against Judaism had to
be created.70
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. Benjamins belief that the past does not consist of crown jewels that belong
in a museum, but of something always affected by the present71 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, Benjamins 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 stand-
point, 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 33

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 tradi-
tional 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Kants feeblemindedness.78 However, in 1917, defending Kants 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 Kants prose per se represents a limes of
literary prose.79 He puts Kant in the same camp as Plato, and avers that his systems
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 Kants Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Morals, an event which marks the
beginning of a relationship with the philosophers 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.
Benjamins 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 (191415) 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
Kants transcendental view of experience, by extending it to include the speculative.
Kants transcendental theory of experience, though directly derived from Locke and
34 Romancing Fascism

Leibniz, goes back to Aristotles 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 minds 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 indepen-
dently (the data of external experience complements the data of internal experience,
the minds reflection on itself). The first direction informed the development of
Locke and Humes philosophies, while the second direction informed the philosophy
of Leibniz. Kants advance on Lockes empirical theory of knowledge and Leibnizs
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.
Kants 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 Kants 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.
Kants 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 35

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 Benjamins understanding of the
speculative is, however, much broader than Kants 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 Kants highest determinates of knowledge, by which he means the
circumscription of knowledge through the categories.
Kant had sought to rehabilitate Aristotles Categories, which had since Boethiuss
translation become increasingly baroque in character, a veritable rhapsody founded
on ordinary knowledge derived through collection rather than reasoned formu-
lation.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. Benjamins criticism of Kants 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
36 Romancing Fascism

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 language89 and a
unique theory of language, as will be shown shortly.
Benjamins relationship to Heidegger has been a matter of much dispute since
Hannah Arendt famously positioned the two thinkers in the same camp in her intro-
duction to Illuminations.90 There are some links: Lucien Goldmann has argued, for
example, that Heidegger was inspired by Lukcss History and Class Consciousness,91
the very text that redirected Benjamins own thinking after he wrote The Origin of
German Tragic Drama. However, Benjamins critical conception of temporality, as
Lwy points out, was developed between the years 1915 and 1925, which precedes
Heideggers 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
Benjamins 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 37

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 Heideggers
Origin of the Work of Art.95 Whereas in Benjamins 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
(Benjamins essay goes through three versions, 1935, 1936 and 1939). At the outset
Benjamins 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 lart pour lart, 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 things 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
38 Romancing Fascism

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
Atgets 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 dont 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 Benjamins 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 lart pour lart 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 arts turn
to war: [humanitys] 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, Heideggers 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 altheia, 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 39

work and as the work is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to truths 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 techn 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 uncon-
cealment of standing reserve.102

Language, Translation, Allegory

Georg Lukcs 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 Benjamins work on allegory as distinctive in this regard. Benjamins
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 Benjamins 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.
Benjamins 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 self-
sufficiency 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 Benjamins understanding of allegory as a
40 Romancing Fascism

form of experience, but he is not inclusive enough in what that experience entails. The
argument here is that Benjamins 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 Hlderlin (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, Benjamins 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 Benjamins
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 Benjamins theory of linguistic experience is the
question of translation, and indeed, as Dttmann 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, trans-
lation 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 Saussures 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 Benjamins 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 Saussures 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.
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 41

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 commu-
nication 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 distin-
guishable from Saussures 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 systems potential
in individual speech acts. Systems consist of signs which are comprised of two psycho-
logical 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 cant 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 Hlderlin 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.
42 Romancing Fascism

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, Gods 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 43

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 Benjamins 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, consid-
eration 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 formu-
lation 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 origi-
nals 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
44 Romancing Fascism

act of naming, so the translatability of the original work of art is given to the trans-
lation 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 own127
Translation, therefore, works in the interests of pure language where what lies
at the origin of all languages cannot be equated with representational correspond-
ences, 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 trans-
lation 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 45

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 defini-
tively 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 under-
stood with reference again to the essay Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hlderlin. 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 ever-
changing world of forms or morphology. According to Cassirer,
With Goethes 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 fundamen-
tally 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 consecu-
tively 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 cant-be-mastered genius
46 Romancing Fascism

and world view on the part of the creator. The task and the poem constitute a unique
sphere that Benjamins 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 intel-
lectual 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 deter-
mines 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 under-
stood. The poets task is not a personalised one: in a sense the poet is the medium
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 47

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 Poets 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 poets 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, Benjamins reading of Hlderlin 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 illus-
trates 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 Benjamins thought: the
cosmological vitalist Ludwig Klages and the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt. In his
early work Benjamin is committed to the Mnnerbund 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
48 Romancing Fascism

Kant to a new understanding of experience, though he adapts Kants dialectical

method for his own purposes. In his search for a total critique, which in his mind
was not available in Kants 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 Lukcs 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. Lifes 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
Benjamins fascination begins as early as 1913 in Hohe Meissner on the occasion
of Klagess 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 49

connection between the body and soul, a division which was later systematised in
Kants 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 wide-
awake 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 Benjamins early essays
such as Gedanken ber Gerhart Hauptmanns Festspiel (1913) and the above-
mentioned 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.
Benjamins interest in Klages was initially enthusiastic, then critical, but it was
never naive. In his Review of Bernoullis Bachofen (1926), Klages is lauded as a great
philosopher and Bernoulli applauded for his application of Bachofens thought to
the grid of Klagess system as represented in Kosmogonis und Eros.149 The extent of
Benjamins engagement with these ideas can be measured in his review article called
The Mendelssohns Der Mensch in der Handscrift (1928) where he critiques Klagess
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 Klagess 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
50 Romancing Fascism

called War and Warriors edited by Ernst Jnger, 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 doesnt 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 franaise, 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 articu-
lated, Benjamin confirms the direct influence of Carl Schmitt. Schmitts 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. Benjamins
own interest in Schmitt predates his conversion to Nazism and it would not be
inappropriate to surmise that Benjamin kept stride with most of Schmitts publica-
tions. 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,
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 51

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 Schmitts 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 Benjamins 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 Schmitts 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 roman-
ticism 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
52 Romancing Fascism

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 provision-
ality, 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 Reichsprsident over
parliament, a power which included the exercise of the state of exception.
Samuel Weber points out that Schmitts 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 Schmitts
works, that is, Political Theology and Dictatorship from which he is also able to devise
in the Trauerspiel a political argument. He argues that Schmitts 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 dicta-
torship 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: Sovern ist, wer ber 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 53

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 Hansjrg 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. Agambens 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
fr Sozialwissenschaften und Socialpolitik, a journal that he had himself published
in, must have read Benjamins 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
Benjamins 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 Sorels 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
54 Romancing Fascism

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 determi-
nation 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 Kants 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 transcen-
dental 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 degen-
eration 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 55

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 justifi-
cation 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.

Benjamins 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 Niobes 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
56 Romancing Fascism

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
Schmitts 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 states 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 Benjamins 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
Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 57

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 specu-
lates, 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 deter-
mining 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 Benjamins text is situated at the cross-
roads of such incommensurable theories such as Nietzsches theory of Greek tragedy,
Carl Schmitts 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 influ-
ences 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
Riegls influence, perhaps because Aby Warburg has been considered more important,
especially by George Steiner who thought that Benjamins true home was with the
Warburg Institute rather than the Frankfurt School.
Alois Reigl, along with art historians Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wlfflin,
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,
Reigls work drew on the developments in history, philosophy, archaeology, aesthetics
and anthropology and like Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl,
58 Romancing Fascism

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 mans 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
Lukcs approvingly grouped him with those important nineteenth-century histo-
rians who recognised that changes in structural forms focus mans 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 Riegls 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 Riegls 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 eras
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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 59

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
Tragdie [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 latters marginalisation as an imperfect
form. What he reads in it, however, is an entirely different allegorical, graphic form-
transforming medium registering a different shape of temporality. Thus it is a perfect
source for understanding the allegorical as the bases upon which an ages 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 Riegls principle of continuity in a review of
Karl Blossfeldts Originary Forms of Art: Photographic Images of Plants (1928), called
News about Flowers:
One senses a gothic parti pris in the bishops 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 monks-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.
60 Romancing Fascism

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 distin-
guish 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 conceptuali-
sation 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 spiders 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 61

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 enthu-
siastically 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, writings very modus operandi is that of interruption.
In this, Benjamin prefigures Derridas 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 inter-
pretation 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 neces-
sarily 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
62 Romancing Fascism

are simply given to be reflected upon. Ideas are pre-existent. The distinction
between truth and coherence provided by knowledge thus defines the idea as
essence. Such is the implication of the theory of ideas for the concept of truth. As
essences, truth and idea acquire the supreme metaphysical significance expressly
attributed to them in the Platonic system.200
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
Goethes 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, philo-
sophical 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 63

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 phenomenologys 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. Benjamins critique returns to the essence of truth:
This, indeed is just what could be meant by the story of the veiled image of Sas,
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 appear-
ances and the ideal realm of truth. The mode of being appropriate to this ideal realm
of truth is the name. Hence Benjamins 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 Gntert, the early twentieth-century linguist and scholar
of Religionswissenschaft, particularly Indo-European religion, who in 1921 published
a work called Von der Sprache der Gtter und Geister in which he identifies a metalin-
guistic 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
Gntert argues that Platos 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 self-
consciousness, 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. Adams work of naming in Genesis verifies the law that all ideas exist in
complete and immaculate independence, not only from phenomena, but, especially
64 Romancing Fascism

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 commu-
nicate, 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 Benjamins 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, Benjamins
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 Leibnizs 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 Leibnizs Discourse on Metaphysics
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 65

(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 Riegls 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

Benjamins 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
66 Romancing Fascism

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 Riegls 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 charac-
teristic 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 historicisms
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,
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 67

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 huft und exaltiert, bevor es sich dem Ende berliefert.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
68 Romancing Fascism

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 sovereigns 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 melan-
choly, 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 contem-
plation; the bipolar disorder of depression combined with manic ecstasy. Mourning
is thematised in the Trauerspiel in several ways: with the sovereigns inability to be
alone because of creaturely and historical guilt and the subsequent use of worldly
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 69

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 theoreti-
cally 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 Benjamins 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
70 Romancing Fascism

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 Derridas argument in Of Grammatology when he
makes allegory a metaphor for writing: This objection, says Benjamin, is of funda-
mental 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 dialecti-
cally 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 Creuzers 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 succes-
sively 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 71

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 mans 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 comprehen-
sibility, 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 authori-
tative 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 roman-
ticism, 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
72 Romancing Fascism

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 Benjamins 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 seven-
teenth century. In Richters 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

Benjamins 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 Lukcss 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 under-
standing, 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
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 73

pre-existing historical forms, and the figure of death in this destruction is emblema-
tised 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 doesnt 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 dialec-
tical 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
74 Romancing Fascism

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 recog-
nisability.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 deaths 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
Jungs work he reads a [f]ascist armature, that is, as he writes to Scholem, the devils
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 Wotans
oak249, 250 by the Christian missionaries. The kind of archaic history that is presup-
posed in Jungs 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 Freuds 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 Frances 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
(185279) 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 Charles-
Franois 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 inter-
prets it, Jugenstil emerges in dialectical opposition as the shattering of the interior;
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 75

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 redemption256 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 inten-
sively 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 dAurevilly, 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 repre-
sented 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 Baudelaires Flowers of Evil, said that he
76 Romancing Fascism

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 Benjamins 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 repre-
sentation 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 Baudelaires Les Fleurs du
mal from the modern aesthetic of art for arts sake, and implicitly from T. S. Eliots
view of him as a poet of morality,267 and no less Stephan Georges apotheosis of him
as the beacon of modern aesthetics,268 he fails to appreciate the unique historical
understanding in which the dialectical image (in Baudelaires 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 histori-
cally produced, the experience of which rendered the social process of the nineteenth
century intelligible to art. For Jauss, however, Benjamins 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 Baudelaires theory of art
reductively, in an authoritarian fashion discarding Baudelaires insight into the dual
nature of the beautiful in which a concept of classical art (which Benjamin claims
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 77

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 Benjamins interpretation to efface and re-render Baudelaires
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 Baudelaires poetry: for Jauss, Baudelaires 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 allegory274 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, nineteenth-
century melancholy is marked by profound alienation.275 Benjamin reads Baudelaires
allegorical vision as buttressed beside Neitzsches eternal return of the repressed and
the revolutionary power of Blanquis 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 experi-
ences: [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 Baudelaires 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
78 Romancing Fascism

of happening, or, to put it differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for an

oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific life out of the
era, a specific work out of the life work. As a result of this method, the lifework
is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework and the entire
course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood
contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed.279
Baudelaires own description of allegory in many ways takes Benjamins view of
language to a logical conclusion. Baudelaire was an admirer of Alphonse Toussenel
(18035), 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 intel-
ligent 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 mans evil
thoughts thus the whole of nature participates in original sin.281 The comments are
made in relation to Toussenels LEsprit des btes: Zoologie passionnelle Mammifres
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 obscu-
rantism of those monopolisers of banking and transportation, who also fear the
light.283

Conclusion
Walter Benjamins 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,
 From Vitalism to the Traumatised Angel of History 79

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
Benjamins 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 Benjamins work
becomes complicit with the atrocities of the time, however, is certainly a real one. This
concern is implied in Derridas reading of Critique of Violence when he despairs of
what he calls the Heideggerian messianico-marxist or archeo-eschatological way
of thinking:
I dont 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
 3

From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference:

Paul de Man

Benjamins 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 Schmitts 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 Mans
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 presen-
tation 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.
82 Romancing Fascism

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 Lehmans 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 Mans 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 critics monumental conceit; it depicts Yeats as no more
than an unwitting mouthpiece for the theories of Paul de Man.8 Lehman, as Rudolphe
Gasch 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 evalu-
ating de Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 condem-
nation 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 Burkes graphing together of their two arguments. But Professah de Man,
well, He Dead!12
Gasch,13 among others, has pointed out that de Mans 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 Mans anti-humanism, and
the perception that he was a foreigner ostensibly out to dupe the Americans with that
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 83

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 Mans
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
Gasch 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 Mans 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 Benjamins thinking over the course of his career20 in ways
that preclude all possibility of closing off understanding, something that Benjamins
weak messianic thinking still offers as a possibility.
This is a complicated enterprise and it is refreshing to read Gasches exasperation
when he confesses that the inability to understand a subject matter or critical approach
that, in principle, concerns ones 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 Mans 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 Mans theoretical enterprise close upon itself .23 How does he
do it? Again, as Gasch says, all of de Mans concepts are allegorised, the concept of
allegory being no exception.24 What follows is a commentary on de Mans 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 charac-
teristic of the 1970s and early 80s when he utilises Hegel and Heidegger to analyse
languages resistance to itself.
84 Romancing Fascism

I.
De Mans 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 objec-
tivisation 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, Benjamins 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 Bubers
Der Jude. De Mans 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. Benjamins 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 Mans
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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Mans own essay can be read as something
of a vindication of Benjamins 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 Montaignes 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 consciousness29 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 Montaignes 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 85

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 subjec-
tivity 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 Montaignes 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 minds 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 Benjamins insight, neither is it an activity
directed toward a reader:
86 Romancing Fascism

the fluidity of subjective consciousness, has a name: it is form, a gratuitous but

rigorous structure that our hands make and unmake without ever completing
A man sits down at his desk and writes, without seeking to communicate with
anyone in particular, without needing to express any violent sentiment that is
tormenting him, without desiring to explain himself to himself or justify himself
morally in his own eyes, without any attempt at fabulation.36
Thus transcendence is the grace of acknowledging the failure of knowledge, morality
and aesthetics. Here Montaigne becomes for de Man the contradiction to Benjamins
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 minds
law .37
Whereas Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins angel witnesses an accumulating pending disaster which the
enlightenment names progress, for Montaigne, writing produces no conclusions,
just contradictions, the minds law.
Montaignes 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 Montaignes work is the persistent activity of
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 87

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 Benjamins 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 mecha-
nisation 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 imper-
atives. 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
88 Romancing Fascism

difficulty of invention? Is not what is sometimes called modern conservatism just

another form of nihilism?41
At this stage he reads this activity as linked with Hegels 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 measured42 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 underneath43. 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 Habermass belief that conservativism is the nihilism of the posthistoire,
in de Mans 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 Benjamins 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 mans 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, Hlderlin 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 89

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 concen-
tration 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 Benjamins influence begins with his 1960 PhD dissertation Mallarm,
Yeats, and the Post-Romantic Predicament,48 as has been shown, even the early works of
the 1950s can be usefully juxtaposed with Benjamins 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 experi-
ences 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
90 Romancing Fascism

consciousness that exists removed from the complications of everyday language use
and is not plagued by the problem of making experience coincide with the repre-
sentation 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 Benjamins theory of language in which the question
of name-ability is central. The task of naming is, in Benjamins theological under-
standing 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 overnaming52. 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 Mans 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 sacr) 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 91

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 demys-
tification 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 Husserls 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 Selbstverhlltheit 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 Husserls 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 fiction62 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 Benjamins 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
92 Romancing Fascism

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 Hgglund describes as Derridas 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 dont 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 Benjamins 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 consti-
tutes 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 techn is important here:
Huizinga, someone Benjamin also read with interest and included in The Arcades
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 93

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 under-
standing 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 Structuralisms moves into existentialism and then phenom-
enology 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 vorstellt76 is translated correctly in Osborne as [i]t means precisely the
94 Romancing Fascism

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 mans fallen condition was inherently allegorical
and mournful precisely because there was no possibility for divine intervention, no
eschatology. This conclusion would support de Mans reading of allegory as signi-
fying 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 melan-
choly 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 Mans 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 Schmitts 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 fullness81. The original law before the Fall, then, is no signifying propo-
sition, but a commandment that commands nothing.82 He argues that these two
orders of law do not follow chronologically in Benjamins thought, nor are they parallel
worlds, but follow the formula there is-not.83 He references Benjamins statement in
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 95

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 Benjamins allegory as a void that signifies precisely the
non-being of what it represents de Man, too, makes a small adjustment which effec-
tively 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 Mans 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 subjec-
tivism 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 Gadamers Truth
and Method which contains a long section on the distinction and historical division
between symbol and allegory extolling en route the brilliance of Kants own contri-
bution 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 insubstanti-
ality, 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 transcen-
dental 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
96 Romancing Fascism

between mind and nature than was possible with the mere associative aesthetics
characteristic of the previous century. When Coleridge transforms Bowless 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 Coleridges 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 inter-
subjective, 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 Rousseaus Julie, ou la nouvelle Hlose. 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 97

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 Mans 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 Julies 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 Julies garden,
which lacks personal expression of a subjectivity observing and instead allegorises
Defoes puritan spiritual autobiography Robinson Crusoe along with the erotic garden
of the first part of Guillaume de Lorriss 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 Benjamins Trauerspiel study
extending the time frame, making it specific to the French context and then general-
ising 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
98 Romancing Fascism

history identified in Benjamins 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 under-
standing of language, through irony, that parallels, but secularises Benjamins 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. Ddoublement
in Baudelaires 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 power-
lessness, 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 mystifi-
cation. 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 transcen-
dental 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 99

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: Aristotles 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. Augustines 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, Lockes
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
100 Romancing Fascism

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, Lockes 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 dismem-
bering 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 shapes113
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. Lockes 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 Mans 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 autobio-
graphical 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 Benjamins Jugenstil, the natural image is now engineered into a figuration with the
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 101

mechanistic and the technological. Here, rather than having substance abuse produced
by the improper combination of ideas, Condillac prefers to speak of conceptual abstrac-
tions. 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 Condillacs 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 subject117], Condillac produces an inside/outside metaphor that under-
stands 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 Mans 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. Lockes 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 domes-
ticate 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 repre-
sentation 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
102 Romancing Fascism

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 presen-
tation 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
Kants 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 hypoty-
posis exists as anything other than a device of memory. De Mans 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 Kants attempt to distinguish the symbolic from the
schematic by avoiding the problematics of language as a reification which would take
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 103

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 Kants 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, Kants 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 Mans 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 Pascals Allegory of Persuasion de Man
104 Romancing Fascism

deals with an earlier attempt by philosophy to manage tropes, that is, Pascals theori-
sation 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 represen-
tation 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 referen-
tially 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 Pascals 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 acknowl-
edges may be possible, though he denies that it is within his capability to engage such
a project. This denial is important because, despite Pascals 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 imper-
ceptibly from a discussion of nominal definition to that of what he calls primitive
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 105

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 Pascals 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
106 Romancing Fascism

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 tauto-
logical. 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 hierar-
chical structure of the divine, indeed, mans own fallen status comes into question.
The point of de Mans 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.
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 107

De Man goes on in this essay to show how this concealing of the absolutely hetero-
geneous in a geometrical system that aspires to the transcendental through the erasure
of its linguistic base, is manifest in the more conventionally literary Penses, 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 Penses, 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 teleo-
logical knowledge. The extent to which all of this is kept within the Christian context is
indicated by another Pense 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 puisquil lest, 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 geometricians 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 dont locate their truth where it belongs, and by locating it where it
is not, their opinions are again very erroneous and very unsound.140
108 Romancing Fascism

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 Pense (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 (perfor-
mance), 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 propo-
sitional 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 Rflexions, what de Man can say is that which the more
literary text of the Penses tells us is that the break [that] in the Rflexions 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 Gasch 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 Kants discrimi-
nation between metaphysical and transcendental principles. The passage is quite
straightforwardly symmetrical and in fact, as de Man notes, parallels the symmetry
of Kants 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 109

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 predi-
cation 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 predi-
lection 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 unhin-
dered 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.
110 Romancing Fascism

Analytical philosophys turn to speech act theory became the most sophisticated
attempt to isolate linguistic performance, at the expense of literary language.
De Mans 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,
Lukcs, Althusser and Adorno, approach the aesthetic as something that functions
in the articulation between the orders of the political and the philosophical. Turning
to Hegels 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
Hegels 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 idea150) 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 111

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 Hegels 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 contra-
dicts 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 Mans 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
112 Romancing Fascism

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 ones 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 episte-
mological 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 self-
determination, 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 Mans 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 113

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 Mans 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 conspira-
torial 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 Mans 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,
Hegels 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 Hegels radical material inscriptions and Schillers ideologizing
aesthetization, a distinction which informs all of the essays collected in Aesthetic
Ideology and distinguishes his approach from Habermas/Marcuses ideology critique
and Terry Eagletons critique of ideology. Schillers misappropriation of Kant, says
Warminsky, demonstrates an utter lack of philosophical interest in Kants critical
project and his empiricization, anthropologization, psychologization, indeed humani-
zation, 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 Schillers 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
114 Romancing Fascism

model that Kant seems to facilitate, and then the subsequent re-inscription of
the performative into another tropological system, Schillers 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 occur-
rence 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 Mans reading the cognitive and the performative exist
together as a kind of doubling, together but completely separate, involved in a single-
directed 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 Kants 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 Schillers Of the Sublime. If Kants work is an occurrence, then
as part of the process of re-inscription, Schillers 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
Schillers reversible chiasmic pattern is hence ahistorical.
By contrast, Kants 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 115

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 Kants understanding of the mathematical and the dynamic sublime by intro-
ducing 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.
Schillers understanding of the theoretical sublime could reasonably be mapped onto
Kants 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 bodys weakness in relation to the power of nature. Thus the
polarity that is described, a polarity that brings Kants thinking into a tidy cognitive
model, is one that pits the representation of a magnitude in opposition with the repre-
sentation of a danger, which ones 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 Kants concern, with a
concern for psychological and empirical questions, practical questions about how the
sublime works. In other words, Kants 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. Schillers
theory of the imagination, unlike Kants, 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
116 Romancing Fascism

From here Schiller shifts from what is ostensibly a psychological model of the imagi-
nation 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 Kants
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 (Hegels 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 synthe-
sisable; 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 Mans 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 117

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 disar-
ticulation 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
Eagletons 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 signifi-
cance 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 Mans 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 clarifi-
cation 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 Spinozas all deter-
mination 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
118 Romancing Fascism

subjects 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 Schlegels interpreters emphasise the
progressive and universal character that he attributes to poetry (Schlegels 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 Schlegels 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
Schlegels 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 119

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 Benjamins reading of Schlegels work in The Concept of Criticism in
German Romanticism174 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 intel-
lectual intuition and its impossibility in the realm of experience, German romantics
were impelled to make this the index of philosophys highest aspirations. In Schlegels
theory of criticism the epistemological foundation of the concept of criticism is the I
reflecting upon the I in thinking, or in Schlegels 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
Fichtes 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 Schlegels 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 Schlegels thought develops, aphorisms aside, he does not eschew
systemisation, though his habit of substituting education, harmony, religion, organi-
sation, history, genius or, indeed, irony, for art as the absolute medium of reflection,
gives it the look of confusing multiformity.177 Benjamin describes Schlegels thinking
as mystical, but not eidetic or ecstatic: Schlegels 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
120 Romancing Fascism

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 Schlegels 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 Benjamins reading of Schlegels formal irony
conveys, de Mans begins The Concept of Irony by staging the problematic of how
to define irony and rates Schlegels essay On Incomprehensibility and Kierkegaards
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 philoso-
phers 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 121

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 under-
standing, 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 under-
standing, 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 Schlegels 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 Schlegels insights on irony proved threatening to philosophers still working
within the German Idealist tradition. Hegel and Kierkegaard, for example, adamantly
resisted Schlegels 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 Mans reading of Fragments 37
and 42 of Schlegels Lyceum challenges the domestication of irony which is the raison
dtre of these three strategies. The reading foregrounds the importance of Fichte in
Schlegels work.
De Man suggests that Fichtes 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 languages 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
122 Romancing Fascism

false usage, but to name and thus to posit anything language is willing to posit183 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 predi-
cation. 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 presup-
poses 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 episte-
mology 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.
Schlegels 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
Schlegels 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
 From Inwardness to Allegories of Reference: Paul de Man 123

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 Benjamins 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 Mans allegory
of reading does a violence to Benjamins 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 deter-
mining 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
Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 cathedrals 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 Shelleys thinking about time and history,
aesthetics and politics. Both of these poems exemplify Shelleys 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
126 Romancing Fascism

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 Shelleys 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 ironya 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,
Shelleys 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 Shelleys
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 Shelleys
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.
Fraistats 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 Mans work of course
suggests that the kind of mastery proposed is an ongoing activity, one that makes the
idea of mastery itself ironic. What Fraistats 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
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 127

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 Shelleys 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 Shelleys atheism
by using mythopoeic14 (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 compar-
ative religious studies to undermine the dominance of Christianity.15 Thus Shelleys
mythography also has a historiographical function which links it with Benjamins
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
128 Romancing Fascism

which Das Wort is flooded.16 Brecht had at that time been editor for the left, anti-
fascist 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 Shelleys
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
Baudelaires employment of allegory. This we can recognise if we call to mind
Shelleys 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 Shelleys 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 Shelleys 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 Baudelaires Crpuscule 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 Shelleys 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 transi-
tions, entirely filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial, in short, abortions.22
Matthew Arnold pronounced Shelley incoherent23 and made him, for the Victorians,
a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 129

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 Benjamins 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 Shelleys use of metaphor as loosely decorative and
sometimes too gaudy.26 Perhaps most damning was F. R. Leaviss claim that Shelleys
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 dtre 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 histori-
cally and culturally specific position, Leavis unknowingly but absolutely contradicts
Benjamins 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 Benjamins Archive.30
The first doll depicts a man on a horse where the horse and man are clearly distin-
guishable; 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 Benjamins 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 melan-
choly and the scepticism of William Drummonds 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
130 Romancing Fascism

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 recog-
nised 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 Shelleys
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 degener-
ating material forces of existence finds something of a reversed parallel in Benjamins
understanding of the Fall as a process of overnaming where linguistic being capitu-
lates to allegory and mourning and can be redeemed only through a weak messianic
power. Shelleys 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 blissful40 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 mind42.
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 131

Distinguishing between Benjamin and Shelleys views of a unity underpinning

perception can be done through the principle of sovereignty. In A Defence of Poetry,
possibly Shelleys 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 inter-
vention 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 Hlderlins poem Timidity, but with
an important qualification. Shelleys 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 energy44 could also be said of Shelley, though his energy was not faith.
The end goal of the form-giving function in Benjamins reading of Hlderlin, 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 determines45 and incorporates the life
of the people and becomes its poetic destiny. Conversely, Shelley is still the poet of
Kants 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 ideas47 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
132 Romancing Fascism

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
Smiths 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
Shelleys 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 Blooms 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
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 133

only be addressed in the second person, never expressed in the third, the sphere
of it. Mans 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 Shelleys
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 Iroquoiss 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 Voltaires ECRASEZ LFAME! (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 poems revolutionary intention: they cover themes such
as cosmology; the corruption of kings and ministers; the smothering of the babies of
134 Romancing Fascism

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 Pilgrims Progress and Piers Plowman, as well as the instruction of Adam
in Paradise Lost, both pedagogical (Raphaels prelapsarian colloquy) and prophetic
(Michaels postlapsarian survey of human events).62 I would prefer the term allegory
to fairytale, however, because, although the poems 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 Mans own critico-linguistics is
prefigured by Shelleys 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 Shelleys own explicit theorising
notably in Defence of Poetry: more particularly, de Mans terminology and critical
procedures are to a telling extent prefigured in Shelleys reflections on the nature
and function of poetic language.63 As she notes, de Mans 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 Mans 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 Shelleys first substantial poem after Queen Mab, that is, Alastor.
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 135

Alastor is structurally and thematically very different from the earlier poem. The
poetry from 181516 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 situa-
tions of the human mind.67 Most critics agree, however, that the poem is disjunctive
and doesnt 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 inher-
ently inadequate and negligible world.68 Michael ONeill, 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,
136 Romancing Fascism

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 narrators once upon a time
[t]here was a poet which then goes on to describe the poets 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
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 137

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 Zodiacs brazen mystery, and dead men
Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,
He lingered, poring on memorials
Of the youths 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 Benjamins 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
times 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,
138 Romancing Fascism

in the quoted stanza above, critiques Benjamin and de Mans 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 doesnt 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 incor-
porates 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,
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 139

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 deaths 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 (15921600). 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 dItalia by Ludovico Antonio Muratori, involved a demonic and tyran-
nical 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
140 Romancing Fascism

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 doesnt want to subject them
to domestic quarrels, dismisses them all. In the second Act Cenci accuses his wife
Lucretia of encouraging Beatrices betrayal and threatens to imprison them. All hope
for protection is lost when the petition to the Pope is returned unopened. Giacomo,
the Counts eldest son, and Orsino discuss the familys predicament and Orsino
suggests that the Count be murdered. In Act III, Beatrice enters the stage, clearly
broken by the Counts 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 Benjamins 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 Wordsworths 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 Wordsworths poem would be
published shortly, wrote a parody of Wordsworths The Idiot Boy and called it Peter
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 141

Bell. Wordsworths poem was then published on 24 April. These poems were reviewed
by John Keats and Leigh Hunt respectively with Hunt critiquing Wordsworths Peter
Bell negatively in the light of Shelleys Rosalind and Helen.75 Wordsworths 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
Shelleys 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 heroic78 and asked that it be published anony-
mously 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 Wordsworths poem, so the impact it was supposed to have never
materialised.79
In fact Shelley had already demonstrated disappointment in Wordsworths 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
demonization82 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
Shakespeares 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 Moores 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 Wordsworths
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 Shelleys attempt to ameliorate
the sting of the poem by claiming that nothing personal was meant other than Shelley
142 Romancing Fascism

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 apostates 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 Shelleys 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 dodeca-
gamic 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 Shelleys great allegory on the city of London
and he quotes nine stanzas from this section of the poem in The Arcades Project, IX,
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
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 143

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 Shelleys 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 Mans 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 Hlderlin, 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 Shelleys 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 Mans 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 Shelleys
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 knowledge92
implied in Henry Lefabvres definition of monumentalisation:
A monumental work, like a musical one, does not have a signified (or signi-
fieds); rather, it has a horizon of meaning: a specific or indefinite multiplicity of
144 Romancing Fascism

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 Shelleys poem. De Man reads the poem as a themati-
sation 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 discussed94 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 Shelleys 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, Shelleys poem. A clue
to the direction the essay will take is in the epigraph which is from Thomas Hardys
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 Shelleys 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 Shelleys 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 uncles 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 couples 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 retrospec-
tively 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
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 145

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 dj 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 oceans 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 Shelleys poem: the structure of archaeo-
logical 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 immedi-
ately 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 Shelleys poetry and it is made to function differently at different times. The
question de Man asks, then, though he doesnt 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,
146 Romancing Fascism

mutilated or allegorised; the second question asks about the ontological status of texts
as opposed to statues and invokes Yeatss 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 Mans strategy
is, like Shelleys, 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 critics 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 asked104 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 under-
standing.105 These moments of interruption and seizure in Shelleys 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 Rousseaus 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 Hardys 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
 How to Do Things with Allegory: Percy Bysshe Shelley 147

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
Rousseaus own writings, is a contrast between the power of words as acts and their
power to produce other words. Rousseaus 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 neces-
sarily have to be a credulous act of avoidance, but one that, as demonstrated in de
Mans reading of Shelleys 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 apostro-
phise 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 Benjamins 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 deaths 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 techn, 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. Shelleys 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
150 Romancing Fascism

has itself succumbed to decay. Clearly, allegory has power; it can also engender hope
in a secularised and progressively reifying world. Shelleys 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. Benjamins thinking produces this
insight. Allegory is potentially pernicious as well as destructive, but as the condition
of signification itself, we cant 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 Langs 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. Langs 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 films various versions
can be read and to what political effect. Wolins 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 Habermass view of modernity as an unfinished
project with Paul de Mans 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 Jrgen 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 Derridas deconstruction construes his thought as neo-conservative, post-
Nietzschean Jewish mysticism.2 Derrida, on the other hand, representing the so-called
French radicalised phenomenological critical position, opposes this repositioning of
 Conclusions 151

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 interna-
tional 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 Jrgen 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 disagree-
ments 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 signifi-
cation against the inescapable forces of institutionalisation upon which the concept
of modernity rests. Habermass primary concern is to theorise a unifying context for
communicative action; de Mans 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 critico-
linguistics 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 Derridas 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
152 Romancing Fascism

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 philo-
sophical discourse of modernity: in aesthetic discourse, before the rise of philosophical
aesthetics, the problem of the modern emerges with the problem of conceptu-
alising the new, rather than configuring subjectivity. By way of example, in the
eighteenth century, Jonathan Swifts 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. Swifts 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 consti-
tutes 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 lhistoire 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.
 Conclusions 153

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 Saussures 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 postmod-
ernism 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 devel-
opment of bureaucratic state apparatuss 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 Mans
interest in the late part of his career is with the technical aspects of critico-linguistics,
while Habermass 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 Mans linguistic turn exacerbates his earlier phenom-
enological insights in not merely fracturing understanding, but, in Benjaminian
fashion, exploding it; Habermass turn, on the other hand, opens up new vistas for
understanding. After Knowledge and Human Interests, in fact, Habermass 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 Mans 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
154 Romancing Fascism

fact the incisiveness of de Mans 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 recon-
structive 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 compe-
tences 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 Mans 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 materi-
ality 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 epistemologi-
cally unreliable; nevertheless, as he says:
 Conclusions 155

[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 ones 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 Kants
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 devel-
opment 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 Positivitat13, 14, or the authori-
tarian 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 Gods 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
156 Romancing Fascism

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
modernitys 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 Hegels 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: unifi-
cation 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 social-
scientific functionalism supersedes Weberian classical sociology. Whereas the earlier
tradition focuses on modernity as both cultural secularisation and the institution-
alisation 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 moderni-
sation 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,
 Conclusions 157

the conceptual horizon of Western rationalism.18 On this abandonment of the histori-

cally situated condition of modernity, two post-Enlightenment discourses arise, one
neoconservative the other anarchistic. The neoconservative discourse of the posthis-
toire 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 histori-
cising strategies, whether they are organic or genetic. In Sign and Symbol in Hegels
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. Hegels 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 Hegels 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 Mans perspective, Hegels 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
158 Romancing Fascism

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 Mans
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 Fukayamas22
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 Mans 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 Mans thinking, on the other hand, is oriented toward resistance, the inevita-
bility 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 Lukcs where
 Conclusions 159

changing modes of production are posited, rather than consciousness, as the means by
which reason necessarily works through history. As Lukcs 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 Lukcss 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 intel-
lectual 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 Lukcs in some of his work.
In aestheticising modernism, Lukcs reads it as psychopathology, a wholesale and
summary rejection of reality which is purely subjective and lacking both content and
direction. Like Freuds psychoanalysis, it is an empty gesture: it expresses nausea,
longing or discomfort. It represents an ideological problem related to the dogma of
160 Romancing Fascism

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 Lukcss
thinking with Habermass, and severs it definitively from de Mans. De Mans reading
of Lukcss 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 uses28) 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
Lukcs and Hegel: on the one hand, the philosophical and literary conjoin at the level
of fabula as Lukcss novel and Hegels 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 Hegels Spirit acquires unquestionable authority in attaining a
full understanding of its own being, while Lukcss 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 Lukcss 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 Lukcs 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, Lukcss 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 dure capable of reconciling ironic discon-
tinuities. Thus Lukcss 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 struc-
tural 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 Lukcs that the
urge for totality which in Lukcss 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
 Conclusions 161

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 sponta-
neous 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 Adornos
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. Nietzsches 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
Nietzsches 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 ones existence
coincides with that of the eternal return.33
This radical differentiating of modernity from history is certainly the surface desire
of Nietzsches text: however, on de Mans reading, it never really succeeds in disen-
tangling itself from a sense of historical causality. To temporalise modernity as life
must include the temporal experience of human mutability, which in Nietzsches
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 Nietzsches denial of history, the text leads
162 Romancing Fascism

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. Nietzsches 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 histori-
cally 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 Nietzsches 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 modernisms 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 consti-
tutes 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 performa-
tivity. 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
 Conclusions 163

Perraults 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. Baudelaires work, like Nietzsches, suppresses memory of anteri-
ority, 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, Baudelaires description of Constantin Guys, as a
man of action and an observer and recorder of events, is a case in point. Baudelaires
analysis of Guys 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 Mans 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 literatures 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 literatures 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
Habermass 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
164 Romancing Fascism

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 form44; however, such primordial anarchism, and the mortifi-
cation 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 philo-
sophical 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 Mans 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 institution-
alised historical concept that reacts to rationalisation processes forms a great deal
of de Mans 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 Habermass terms returning European
thought to what he calls a form of traditionalism. This agenda suggests not counter-
Enlightenment 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
 Conclusions 165

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 problem-
atics of consciousness and language supersede the possible synthesis of phenomenal
and material domains.
De Mans 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 Habermass 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 organ-
ising 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 Mans thinking makes this
ontological dilemma, ultimately, a linguistic condition, a condition upon which the
very possibility of criticism rests.
 Notes

Notes to Preface
1 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).
2 Michael Lwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans.
Catherine Porter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 1617.
3 Ibid., 5782.
4 Ibid., 41.

Notes to Introduction
1 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton:
The Harvester Press Ltd., 1982), 5.
2 David Hoy, Splitting the Difference: Habermass Critique of Derrida, in Habermas
and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, (ed.) Passerin dEntreves and Benhabib
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 124.
3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (ed.) John W. Yolton
(London: Everyman, 1961), 174268.
4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan Education Ltd., 1929), 283.
5 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979), 29.
6 Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1987), 7.
7 Karl Marx, The Destiny of Capitalism, in Marxism: Essential Writings, ed. David
McLellan (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1988), 4951.
8 Christopher Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction, and
Critical Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 7081.
168 Notes

9 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987),
13.
10 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso,
1995), 9.
11 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991), 6.
12 Arjun Appardurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 3247.
13 Andrew Feenberg, Modernity Theory and Technological Studies, in Modernity
and Technology, (ed.) Misa Brey and Feenberg (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press,
2003), 967.
14 Lindsay Waters, Introduction, Paul de Man: Life and Works, in Critical Writings:
19531978 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989), ixlxxiv.
15 Marjorie Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 5.
16 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century
Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1.
17 Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1996), 2.
18 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1964), 2.
19 Ibid., 2.
20 Iibid., 2.
21 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), 6786 and (October, no. 13, Summer 1980), 5980, Douglas Crimp, On the
Museums 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), 4356, Joel Fineman The Structure of
Allegorical Desire (October, no. 12, Spring 1980), 4356. 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).
22 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991), 167.
23 Ibid., 168
24 Ibid., 168..
25 Allegory and Violence, 2.
26 Ibid., 3.
 Notes 169

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 Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick
Lawrence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 7.
2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991), 2, 63, 152.
3 Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul Ltd., 1973), 365.
4 Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University, 1973), 89.
5 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.
6 Jacob Burckhardt, Reflexions on History (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd,
1943), 6770.
7 Ibid., 139.
8 The Seduction of Unreason, xi.
9 Ibid., 55.
10 Ibid., xiii.
11 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.
12 The Seduction of Unreason, 301.
13 Czesaw Miosz, The Captive Mind (London: Penguin, 1981, 1953), 124.
14 Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review
Books, 2001), xi.
15 Bernd Witte, Benjamin and Lukcs. Historical Notes on the Relationship between
Their Political and Aesthetic Theories. New German Critique, No. 5 (Spring) 1975,
326.
16 Georg Lukcs, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the
Dialectic, trans. Leslie Esther, introduction by John Rees, postface by Slavoj iec
(London and New York: Verso, 2000), 47. This text was never published and
considered lost by Lukcs himself until it was discovered in the CPSU archives in
Moscow. It was first published in Hungarian in 1996.
17 Benjamin and Lukcs, 26.
18 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

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.
19 Metahistory, 8.
20 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Oxon: Routledge,
1998), 152.
21 Paul de Man, Reading and History, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 68.
22 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 370.
23 Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory, in The Resistance to Theory, (ed.) Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11.
24 It is possible that de Man was familiar with Benjamins 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 fr Sozialforschung.
25 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 1223.
26 Barbara Johnson has claimed that de Mans writing was incomprehensible without
an understanding of Walter Benjamin (in conversation, 1991).
27 Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994), xxi.
28 Benjamin and Lukcs, 26.
29 Ibid., 26.
30 Dr Wolf-Peter Koch wrote a letter to Schmitt to query his involvement in the
Nazi regime. Schmitts reply was only to address certain theoretical aspects of
constitutional law. See Wolf-Peter Koch, Die Reform des Strafverfahrenrechts im
Dritten Reich unter besonderer Bercksichtigung des StVO-Entwurfs 1939: Ein
Beitrag zur Strafrechtsgeschichte, Inaugural-Dissertation (der Juristischen Fakultt der
Friedrich-Alexander-Universitt, Erlangen-Nrnberg, 1972), 65.
31 Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 7980.
32 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),
1338.
33 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).
34 Jay Bernstein, Art Against Enlightenment, in The Problems of Modernity (London
and New York: Routledge, 1989), 51.
35 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.
36 Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1981), 24.
37 Ibid., 34.
38 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.
 Notes 171

39 Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin

19101940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 313.
40 Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 127.
41 The extent of Schmitts 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 Fhrer
schtzt das Recht [The Fhrer 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), xxi.
43 A point that Jrgen 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. Jrgen 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), 4515. As Bredekamp notes, Alexander Kojve is
purported to have dismissed himself from a lecture in the Freie Universitt 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), 3267.
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 Britains
Most Corrupt Poet of Error, in Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality,
172 Notes

Graham Allen, Carrie Griffin and Mary OConnell (eds) (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 2011), 6174.

Notes to Chapter 2
1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1985), 166.
2 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History in Selected Writings, Volume 4,
19381940, 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 Benjamins work:
lifetime, that is the reception of his work in his own lifetime 18921940 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 doppelgnger, 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 Benjamins writing in Germany was short and almost eruptive according to
Habermas, never exploding into the full-scale Benjamania witnessed in the Anglo-
American intellectual community.
4 This crisis was inspired by philosophers such as William Dilthey and Friedrich
Nietzsche.
5 Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin 18921940, 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, Benjamins 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 Hlderlin, 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. 19131926, ed. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1996), 102.
 Notes 173

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 deaths 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 deaths 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 deaths 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 Deaths
Head Unit or the Totenkopfverbande.
18 Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter
Benjamins Philosophy of History and Art (SoPhi: University of Jyvskyl, 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/Image-
Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamins Philosophy of History and Art,
(SoPhi: University of Jyvskyl, 1998), 12. Although I accept her understanding
of cairological time, I disagree that this should be understood solely in contrast
to chronological time in Benjamins work. Benjamins 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 Anglus 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 lawyers 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 preachers talar, but
174 Notes

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.
22 Michael Lwy, Fire Alarm, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 62.
23 Origin, 166.
24 George Steiner, Introduction to Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 20.
25 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), 32639.
26 We could say that this disagreement belongs to the second phase of reception history
of Benjamins 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 Benjamins early thinking
brought together the extremes of the political right and left.
27 Theodor Adorno, Commitment, in Notes to Literature, Volume 2, trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 94.
28 The poem is translated by Gary Smith and reproduced in the notes to a letter to
Gershom Scholem in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 19101940, 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),
1823.
29 Ibid., 183.
30 Experience, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 296.
31 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship (London: Faber and
Faber, 1982), 234.
32 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1990), 241.
33 Jrgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-raising or rescuing critique,
in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume 1, ed. Peter
Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 1078. In this Habermas clearly takes over
metaphors found in Benjamins own work. For example, Samuel Weber notes in
another context that Habermas recuperates Benjamins metaphors in his account
of Foucaults 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, Benjamins Abilities, (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 134.
34 Ibid., 109.
35 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), 2545.
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, 312.
42 Leslie Esther, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London and Sterling, VI:
Pluto Press, 2000), 15.
43 Ibid., 1617.
44 George Steiner, To Speak of Walter Benjamin, in Benjamin Studien/Studies
(Vol. 1, No. 1, 1 May 2002), 1123. The others include the formative role of youth
movements and Benjamins own active participation in the Freideutsche Jugend
and commitment to Gustav Wynekens 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), 1123.
45 George Moss, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985), 3.
46 Ibid., 4.
47 Ludwig Quessel, Die jdische Neukolonisation Palstinas, 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 Scholems 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. Strausss contribution to the debate was a volume that challenged
modernitys reduction of critique to secularisation, Spinozas Critique of Religion,
which he published in 1930. The book takes Spinozas 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), 87136.
50 Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1991), 29.
51 See Jacques Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(London: The Althine Press, 1981), 61155.
52 Anson Rabinbach, Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch and
modern German Jewish Messianism, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in
Cultural Theory, Vol. III, 19351938, (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,
19381940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2003), 174.
60 Ibid., 35.
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 Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), 839.
67 Stephanie Moss, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans.
Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 19.
68 Correspondence, 226.
69 Correspondence, 7980.
70 Ibid., 99100.
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), 912.
 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., 978.
81 Ibid., 168.
82 But contrary to Wolins reading of the Max Reinhardt staging of Gerhart
Hauptmanns pacifist Festspiel in deutschen Reiman (1913), Benjamins 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 ber 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 erkmpfte 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, 19942000).
86 Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kants Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (Basingbrook: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1929), 1437.
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, Lukcs 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

from the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John Van Buren (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002), 56.
94 Correspondence, 82.
95 Chris P. Long, Arts Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art and Politics, in New
German Critique, No 83, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, (SpringSummer 2001),
89115.
96 Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 19381940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings (eds) (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2003), 252.
97 Ibid., 256.
98 Arts Fateful Hour, 97.
99 Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, 269.
100 Ibid., 270.
101 Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, (ed.) by David
Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 206.
102 Ibid. 3389.
103 On Walter Benjamin, in Cultural Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. III, 1.
104 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.
105 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. trans. John Osborne
(London: Verso, 1985), 160, 165.
106 Bainard Cowan, Walter Benjamins Theory of Allegory, in Walter Benjamin: Critical
Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol II, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London: Routledge,
2005), 57.
107 Dttman Alexander Garca, The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Benjamin,
Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, trans. Arline Lyons (London: The Athlone Press, 2000),
35.
108 On Language as Such and the Language of Man, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 69.
109 Ibid., 67.
110 Ibid., 62.
111 Ibid., 63.
112 Ibid., 64.
113 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 Gods 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).
114 Two Poems by Friedrich Hlderlin, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 19.
115 Ibid., 70.
116 Ibid., 65.
 Notes 179

117 Ibid., 65.

118 Ibid., 69.
119 Ibid., 68.
120 ibid., 70.
121 Ibid., 72.
122 Ibid., 73.
123 Ibid., 74.
124 The Task of the Translator, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 253.
125 Ibid., 254.
126 Ibid., 256.
127 Ibid., 256.
128 Ibid., 257.
129 Ibid., 257.
130 ibid., 257.
131 Ibid., 258.
132 Two Poems by Friedrich Hlderlin, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 18.
133 Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe. trans. Gutman, Kristeller and Randall, Jr.
(New York: Harper Torchbook, 1963), 689.
134 J. W. von Goethe, Scientific Studies (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 39.
135 Two Poems by Friedrich Hlderlin: The Poets Courage and Timidity in
Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 19.
136 Ibid., 19.
137 Ibid., 19.
138 Ibid., 20.
139 Ibid., 20.
140 Ibid., 25.
141 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.
142 Georg Lukcs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin,
1980), 191.
143 Nitzan Lebovic, The Beauty and Terror of Lebensphilosophie: Ludwig Klages, Walter
Benjamin, and Alfred Baeumler, South Central Review (23.1, 2006), 25.
144 Ibid., 24.
145 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.
146 Ibid. The ancient Greeks desired to wed together mans 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.
147 Ibid.
148 Life of Students, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 37.
180 Notes

149 Review of Bernoullis Bachofen, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 427.

150 Ibid., 132.
151 Ibid., 1323.
152 Correspondence, 366.
153 Walter Benjamin, Theories of German Fascism, in Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 19271930, trans. Rodney Livingston et al., eds Howard
Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1999), 3201.
154 Walter Benjamin, Johann Jakob Bachofen, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Vol. 3, 19351938, 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.
155 Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 834.
156 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.
157 Benjamin included three footnotes in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels
acknowledging his debt to Schmitt. These were excluded in the two-volume edition
of Benjamins work published by Theodor and Greta Adorno in 1955.
158 Walter Benjamin, Lebenslauf Gesammelte Schriften 7:1:219.
159 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 mchte ich es Ihnen nicht nur ankndigen, sondern
Ihnen auch meine Freude darber aussprechen, da 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 Souvernitt im 17.
Jahrhundert Ihnen verdankt. Vielleicht darf ich Ihnen darber hinausgehend sagen,
da ich auch Ihren spteren Werken, vor allem der Diktatur eine Besttigung
meiner kunstphilosophischen Forschungsweisen durch Ihre staatsphilosophischen
entnommen habe. Wenn Ihnen die Lektre meines Buches dieses Gefhl
verstndlich erscheinen lt, so ist die Absicht seiner bersendung erfllt.
Mit dem Ausdruck besonderer Hochschtzung
Ihr sehr ergebener
Walter Benjamin
160 Carl Schmitt, Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (Tbingen:
Mohr, 1914), 402.
161 Theodor Adorno, A Portrait of Walter Benjamin, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber
and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 22741.
162 Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2000), 42.
163 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 5.
164 Tracey Strong, Forward to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty, xixii.
165 Tracy Strong makes the claim that Schmitts anti-Semitism in this book is different
 Notes 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.
166 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 52.
167 Ibid., 523.
168 Critique of Violence, in Selected Writings: Vol. 1, 238.
169 Ibid., 243.
170 Ibid., 243.
171 Ibid., 245.
172 Ibid., 247.
173 Ibid., 248.
174 Ibid., 2034.
175 Ibid., 24950.
176 Ibid., 2512.
177 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.
178 Political Theology, 57.
179 Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 392.
180 Origin, 20.
181 Burkhardt Lindner, Habilitationsakte Benjamin: ber ein academisches
Trauerspiel und ber ein Vorkapitel der Frankfurter Schule, Zeitschrift fr
Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 14 (1984), 14765.
182 Dominik Finkelde, The Presence of the Baroque: Benjamins 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.
183 Curriculum Vitae (III), in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 78.
184 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), 15960.
185 Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 153.
186 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:
Continuum, 1997, 2004), 77, 223.
187 Curriculum Vitae (III), in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 19271930, 78.
188 Ibid., 78.
189 Ibid., 668.
190 Origin, 58.
191 Walter Benjamin, Curriculum Vitae (IV), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Vol. 4, 19381940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., (eds) Howard Eiland and Michael
W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003),
382.
192 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, 1927193, 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, 19351938, 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 Gntert in the 1930s: 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, Times Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and
Temporality in Fin-de-Sicle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006),
204.
209 Origin, 55.
210 Fate and Character, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 2034.
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 Schmitts
understanding and Benjamins (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), 2456.
214 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I.1, Unter Mitwirkung von Theodor
Adorno und Gershom Scholem herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann
Schweppenhuser (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.
 Notes 183

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., 1656.
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 Wotans 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.
251 Carl Jung wrote an essay called Wotan in Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich: n.s.,
III, 1936), 65769.
252 Correspondence, 476.
253 Correspondence, 482.
254 Arcades Project, 9.
255 Ibid., 20.
256 Ibid., 908.
257 Ibid., 221.
258 Ibid., 916.
259 Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance gnrale II, quoted in Charles Baudelaire:
Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. E. P. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972),
292.
260 Barbey dAurevilly, Articles justicatifs pour Charles Baudelaire, auteur des Fleurs du
mal, (Paris, 1957) cited in The Arcades Project, 234.
261 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (London: The
Harvester Press, 1982), 132.
262 Correspondence, 230.
263 Benjamin repeatedly refers to Baudelaires life as one of allegory.
264 Arcades Project, 336.
265 Arcades Project, 463.
266 Arcades Project, 464.
267 T. S. Eliot, The Lesson of Baudelaire, Tyro, Vol. I (Spring 1921), 4 .
268 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.
269 Hans Robert Jauss, Reflections on the Chapter Modernity in Benjamins
Baudelaire Fragments, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory,
Volume II, Modernity, (ed.) Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge,
2005), 110.
270 T. J. Clark, Should Benjamin have Read Marx?, in Critical Evaluations, Volume 2, 86.
271 Ibid., 111.
272 Ibid., 11213.
273 Ibid., 115.
274 Le Cygne in Les Fleurs du mal, 268.
275 Arcades Project, 21.
276 Arcades Project, 15.
277 Les Fleurs du mal, 92.
278 Correspondence, 557.
279 On the Concept of History in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 396.
280 Arcades Project, 195.
281 Arcades Project, 241.
 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, 1923.
284 Letter of 1 February 1939 in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 206.
285 Force of Law 623.

Notes to Chapter 3
1 See for example, William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberal
Constitutionalism, in The Review of Politics, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), 299322.
2 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.
3 The Lesson of Paul de Man, Yale French Studies Special Issue, No. 69, 1985, 321.
4 Rodolph Gasch, The Wild Card of Reading (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1998), 2.
5 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: the Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 178.
6 Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading Figures of Understanding in Romantic
Theory and Practice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3256.
7 Michael ONeill, The Human Minds Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelleys
Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5.
8 David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New
York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 131.
9 The Wild Card of Reading, 300.
10 Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic
Ideology (London: Routledge, 1988), 18990.
11 Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in
Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 175.
12 Lindsay Waters, Professah de man he dead, American Literary History, Vol. 7, No.
2 (Summer, 1995), 284303.
13 Despite his oscillation in opinion of de Mans work, Gasch 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 Mans 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.
14 The Wild Card of Reading, 239.
15 Professah de man he dead, 2856.
16 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 910, 3589.
17 Ibid., 235.
18 Paul de Man, Montaigne and Transcendence, in Critical Writings, 19531978, (ed.)
Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 10.
19 Marc Redfield, John Guillorys 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 Benjamins 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 fr
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 Jays point of view, did not work. De Mans 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 192350 (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,
19531978 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., 1415.
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 Derridas 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, 6873.
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 Husserls blindness to his failure to self-criticise parallels de Mans
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 Hgglund, 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), 16.
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, 345.
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 Mans Criticism 19531970 (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 dtange. The world is ever divided
for me into only two regions, where she is and where she is not. Jean Jacques
Rousseau, La Nouvelle Hloise, trans. Judith H. McDowell (Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University, 1968), 28.
100 Julies 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
Hloise, trans. Judith H. McDowell (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University,
1968), 3045.
101 Ibid., 204.
102 Ibid., 205.
103 Ibid., 207.
104 Ibid., 208.
105 Ibid., 211.
 Notes 189

106 Ibid., 212.

107 Ibid., 213.
108 Ibid., 214.
109 Paul de Man, Epistemology of Metaphor, in Aesthetic Ideology, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 49.
110 Ibid., 34.
111 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1987), 53.
112 The Epistemology of Metaphor, 37.
113 Ibid., 412.
114 Ibid., 38.
115 Ibid., 41.
116 Ibid., 42.
117 Ibid., 44.
118 Ibid., 45.
119 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Meredith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2009), 221.
120 The Epistemology of Metaphor, 47.
121 Ibid., 46.
122 The Critique of Judgement, 116.
123 Paul Guyer, Kants Distinction Between the Sublime and the Beautiful, in The
Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 35, No. 4 (June 1982), 757.
124 Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (London:
Blackwell, 1991), 236.
125 Epistemology of Metaphor, 49.
126 Paul de Man, Pascals Allegory of Persuasion, in Aesthetic Ideology, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 51.
127 Ibid., 52
128 Ibid., 52.
129 Ibid., 55.
130 Ibid., 56.
131 Ibid., 56, quoted from Pascals Rflexions sur la gomtrie en gnral; De lesprit
gomtrique et de lArt de persuader, in Oeuvres compltes, (ed.) Louis lafuma (Paris:
ditions du Seuil, Collection lIntgrale, 1963), 350.
132 Ibid., 56.
133 Pascals Allegory of Persuasion, 589.
134 Ibid., 59.
135 Ibid., 59.
136 Ibid., 59.
137 Ibid.. 62.
138 Ibid. 63, from Pascals Penss, in Oeuvres compltes, (ed.) Louis lafuma (Paris:
ditions du Seuil, Collection lIntgrale, 1963), 514.
139 Ibid., 65.
140 Ibid., 67.
141 Ibid., 67.
142 Ibid., 68.
143 Ibid., 69.
144 Rudolphe Gasch, In-Difference to Philosophy: de Man on Kant, Hegel and
190 Notes

Nietzsche, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 272.
145 Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, in Aesthetic Ideology, 71.
146 Ibid., 71.
147 Ibid., 72.
148 Andrzej Warminski, Introduction: Allegories of Reference, in Aesthetic Ideology, by
Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13.
149 Paul de Man, Hegel on the Sublime, in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 106.
150 Ibid., 108.
151 Ibid., 109.
152 Ibid., 112.
153 Ibid., 11213.
154 Ibid., 113.
155 Ibid., 114.
156 ibid., 115.
157 Ibid., 115.
158 Paul de Man, Kant and Schiller, in Aesthetic Ideology, 117.
159 bid., 118.
160 Andrzej Warminski, Introduction: Allegories of Reference, in Aesthetic Ideology, 7.
161 Ibid., 130.
162 Ibid., 133.
163 Ibid., 133.
164 Ibid., 1334.
165 Ibid., 133.
166 Ibid., 144.
167 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Formalisation: Kleists Uber das Marionettentheater, in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984),
264.
168 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwells, 1990), 27.
169 Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990), 42.
170 Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 167.
171 Peter Firchow, Introduction to Lucinde and the Fragments by Friedrich Schlegel
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 23.
172 Ibid., 168.
173 Ibid., 48.
174 The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, in Selected Writings Volume 1,
116200.
175 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.
176 The Concept of Criticism, 1245.
177 Ibid., 1378.
178 Ibid., 141.
179 Ibid., 1645.
180 The Concept of Irony, 165.
 Notes 191

181 Ibid., 166.

182 Ibid., 169.
183 Ibid., 173.
184 Ibid., 174.
185 Ibid., 178.
186 Ibid., 179.
187 The Concept of Irony, 182.
188 The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, 164.
189 The Concept of Irony, 183.
190 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 358.
191 Shelley Disfigured, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 122.

Notes to Chapter 4
1 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), 40923.
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, Marys half sister, understood
that Shelleys 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 Shelleys 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), 954.
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
192 Notes

Before Collected, Vo. II, (ed.) by Roger Ingpen (London: G. Bell and Sons., Ltd.,
1914), 71415.
12 Illegitimate Shelley, 41020.
13 Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1971), 3.
14 Harold Bloom, Shelleys Mythmaking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 10.
15 Marilyn Butler, Myth and Mythmaking in the Shelley Circle, ELH, Vol. 49, No. 1,
(Spring 1982), 5072.
16 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1973), 115.
17 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), 186203. 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 Benjamins 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).
18 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.
19 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 370.
20 James E. Barcus (ed.) Shelley: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1975), 2268.
21 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 Shelleys 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, 2456.
22 Ibid., 3412 352.
23 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, (ed.) Stephan Collini
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30.
24 Arnold Baron, (ed.), Poetry of Byron, Chosen and Arranged by Matthew Arnold
(London: BiblioLife, 2009), 21.
25 Mary Shelley, Note to Prometheus Unbound in Shelley: Poetical Works, 270.
26 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), 5430.
27 F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), 172.
28 Ibid., 172.
29 More recent scholarship is less faint-hearted: Kenneth Camerons two important
volumes, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (1950) and Shelley: the Golden Years
 Notes 193

(1974) are biographical works that follow the development of Shelleys radicalism
from his early novels Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne to his last works Prometheus Unbound
and The Triumph of Life. Earl Wassermans Shelley: A Critical Reading reads two
abiding philosophical convictions in Shelleys 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 Foots Red Shelley
(1984) stands out as a work that enacts a sensitive engagement with his politics.
Others focus on Shelleys handling of the language of poetry independent of his
politics: William Keach and Michael ONeill both reject all poststructuralist or
deconstructionist readings of the work. Keach claims that Shelleys 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. ONeills study
which claims that Shelleys language is more intent on self-sustaining invention than
on allegory, and that a selfaware reader sensitive to the writers 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.
30 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamins Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie,
(ed.) Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla (London
and New York: Verso, 2007), 84.
31 Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part
2, 19311934, 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), 81415.
32 See for example Terence Allan Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology: Shelleys Political
Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1988).
33 Percy Bysshe Shelley, On Life in Shelleys Prose or Trumpet of a Prophecy ed. David
Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 1724.
34 Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and the Language of Man, in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 73.
35 On Life, 172.
36 Anne Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poets Search for Himself (London: Jonathan Cape,
2007), ix.
37 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelleys Prose, 296.
38 Frank B. Evans, Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity, in Studies in
Philology, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October, 1940), 63240.
39 Shelley: A Critical Reading, 136.
40 On Language as Such and on the Language of Man in Selected Writings, Volume 1,
72.
41 On Life, in Shelleys Prose, 174.
42 Ibid., 174.
43 A Defence of Poetry, in Shelleys Prose, 297.
44 Paul de Man, Critical Writings, 7.
45 Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 27.
46 A Defence of Poetry, Shelleys Prose, 279.
47 An Address to the Irish People, Shelleys Prose, 59.
194 Notes

48 A Defence of Poetry, Shelleys Prose, 279.

49 Ibid., 277.
50 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A Miller, 1759), ii.
51 David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (New York: Cosimo,
2006), 65.
52 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.
53 Merle A. Williams, Contemplating Facts, Studying Ourselves: Aspects of Shelleys
Philosophical and Religious Prose, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, (ed.) by Alan Weinberg
and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 200.
54 Shelleys Mythmaking, 3.
55 A Defense of Poetry, in Shelleys Prose, 277.
56 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, 192.
57 Ibid., 192.
58 Ibid., 379.
59 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, (ed.)
Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2004), 497.
60 Ibid., 52233.
61 The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 2, 494.
62 Christopher Miller, Happily Ever After? The Necessity of Fairytale in Queen Mab, in
The Unfamiliar Shelley, 69.
63 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.
64 Ibid., 69.
65 Essay on a Future State, in Shelleys Prose, 175.
66 Ibid., 177.
67 Shelley: Poetical Works, 14.
68 Shelley: A Critical Reading, 39.
69 The Human Minds Imaginings, 1112.
70 Shelley: Poetical Works, 18.
71 Time and History in Wordsworth, 934.
72 Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude, in Shelley: Poetical Works, 18.
73 Ibid., 19.
74 Ibid., 1920.
75 Jack Benoit Gohn, Did Shelley Know Wordsworths Peter Bell? in Keats-Shelley
Journal, Vol. 28, (1979), 204.
76 Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), 351.
77 Ibid., 627.
78 Letters Of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, 735.
79 Ibid., 375.
 Notes 195

80 Shelley: Poetical Works, 526.

81 Ibid., 5745.
82 Steven Jones, Shelleys 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., 3623.
86 One early (1965) scholarly edition, for example, is by Donald Reiman. See Donald
Reiman, Shelleys 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 Reimans Shelleys
The Triumph of Life and includes the changes made in Mary Shelleys 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. Shelleys
The Triumph of Life, 11828.
88 Ibid., 121.
89 Theodor Adorno, Parataxis: On Hlderlins Late Poetry, in Notes to Literature
Volume II (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1356.
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, 50711.
100 Shelley Disfigured, 94.
101 Shelley: Poetical Works, 18.
102 Shelley Disfigured, 945.
103 Ibid., 96.
104 Ibid., 98.
105 Ibid., 98.
106 Shelley: Poetical Works, 517, lines 40011.
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 Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy II (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 153.
2 The Philosophical Discourse of Moderny, 16184.
3 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe, (Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 967.
4 Jrgen 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.
5 The Resistance to Theory, in The Resistance to Theory, 1013.
6 Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), 122.
7 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), 478.
8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 107.
9 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 192.
10 Resistance to Theory, in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), 11.
11 Ibid., 11.
12 Ibid., 12.
13 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pc/index.htm [accessed
August 2010].
14 In The Positivity of Christian Religion, Hegel claims that Christian Orthodoxy
became positive despite Jesuss 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.
15 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 25.
16 Ibid., 26.
17 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 30.
18 Ibid., 3.
19 Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics, in Aesthetic Ideology, 92.
20 Ibid., 94.
21 Ibid., 104.
22 Francis Fukayama, The End of History? The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 318.
23 George Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press Ltd., 1962), 65.
24 The Philosophical Discorse of Modernity, 143.
25 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 2.
26 Paul de Man, Georg Lukacss 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 Lukacss 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 Mans 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 Mans thinking from the circle of
influences that is here being drawn.
42 Ibid., 34.
43 Ibid., 4.
44 Literary History and Literary Modernity, 143.
45 De Mans 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
dAnnunzio, 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 fr 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, Eugne 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
dAurevilly, 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
Cline, 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, tienne 100, 101, 102
Consciousness Raising or Rescuing
Critique see Habermas, Jrgen
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 211
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
deaths 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, Ren 1, 34, 153, 158
Dialectic of the Enlightenment See Theodor
Adorno; Max Horkheimer
Dictatorship see Schmitt, Carl
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
Dttmann, Alexander Garca 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
Gasch, Rudolphe 82, 83, 108, 185, 189,
202
Gazette de Charleroi see de Man, Hendrik
Gedanken ber 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
Gntert, Hermann 63, 182, 204
Guyer, Paul 103, 189, 202
Habermas, Jrgen
philosophical discourse of modernity
1, 153
Habermas, Jrgen 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
Hgglund, 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 213
History and Class Consciousness 36, 72,
169, 181, 204 see also Lukcs,
Georg
Hitler, Adolf 7, 50, 171, 183, 184, 202,
203, 206
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 75
Hlderlin, 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, Jrgen
Illuminations see Benjamin, Walter
Institut fr 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
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 Hlose see Rousseau,
Jean Jacques
Jnger, 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
Kants 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, Sren 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, Jrgen
Kosmogonis und Eros see Klages, Ludwig
Kunstwollen 58, 65, 75, 127, 180, 181, 205
see Reigl, Alois; Benjamin,
Walter
LEsprit des btes: Zoologie passionnelle
Mammifres 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
Lwy, Michael 22, 24, 25, 26, 36, 167, 174,
204
Lucinde see Schlegel, Friedrich
Lucis, Asja 72
Lukcs, 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
Mallarm, Yeats, and the Post-Romantic
Predicament see de Man, Paul
Manifeste Aux Members Du Parti
Ouvrier Belge see de Man, Hendrik
Mnnerbund 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 Mendelssohns 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, Jrgen
Mont Blanc see Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Montaigne and Transcendence see de
Man Paul
 Index 215
Moore, Thomas 141
Moscow Diary see Benjamin, Walter
Moss, Stphane 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 franaise 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
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 Franois
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
Pascals Allegory of Persuasion see de
Man, Paul
Passagen-Werk see Benjamin, Walter
Peirce, Charles Sanders 109
Penses 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 Pilgrims 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
Poets Courage see Hlderlin, 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, Jrgen
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 Bernoullis 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 217
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, Ren
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
Selbstverhlltheit 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,
193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202,
203, 205, 206, 207
Shelley, Timothy 127
Shelley Disfigured see de Man, Paul
Sign and Symbol in Hegels 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, Jrgen
Theory of the Novel see Lukcs, 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 Hlderlin, 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 Hlderlin see
Benjamin, Walter
Universalpoesie see Schlegel, Friedrich
Verfassungslehre see Schmitt, Carl
Victorian market see Victorian society
Victorian society 18
Viel, Charles Franois 74
Viesel, Hansjrg 53
Voltaire 133, 146
Von der Sprache der Gtter und Geister see
Guntert, Hermann
Walter Benjamins Archive see Benjamin,
Walter
War and Warriors see Jnger, 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
Wlfflin, Heinrich 57
 Index 219

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 fr Sozialforschung see
Institutue for Social Research
Zionism 28, 30, 31, 175 see Judaism
Zivilisation 48