Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

• Authors: Jack Wong
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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

Keywords

EN

Allegory; Walter Benjamin; postmodernism; theology; messianism; dialectics; deconstruction; constellation; ruin; Trauerspiel

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 37-59

Dates

published

2015-12-01

online

2016-02-12

Contributors

author

Jack Wong

• Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/abcsj-2015-0007