Allegory: Between deconstruction and dialectics

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 1999, Pages

  Day, Gail ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249695156     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/22.1.103     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1979), p. 155.
2. Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism', published in two parts, October, no. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 67-86 and October, no. 13, Summer 1980, pp. 59-80;
3. Douglas Crimp's essays from the early 1980s are anthologized in On the Museum's Ruins (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993) - citations are to the essay 'On the Museum's Ruins', p. 47;
4. B. H. D. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art', Artforum, vol. 21, no. 1, September 1982, pp. 43-56.
5. Further contributions include Joel Fineman, 'The Structure of Allegorical Desire', October, no. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 47-66.
6. Stephen Melville criticized these accounts in 1981, 'Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism', October, no. 19, Winter 1981, pp. 55-92.
7. A wave of extended studies on allegory emerged from literary studies departments in the United States during the post-war period. See, for example, Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Oxford University Press: New York, 1966), originally from 1959 ;
8. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1964);
9. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 1979.
10. Paul de Man's seminal essay, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality' dates from 1969; references are to the version reprinted in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1983).
11. De Man's collection of essays on allegory dates from 1979, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1979);
12. references for the essay 'Reading (Proust)' are to this volume. Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, although written in the 1920s, was reissued in Germany in 1963, and published in English translation in 1977; references are to the Verso edition (Verso: London and New York, 1985).
13. On the distinction between allegory and enigma, and allegory's aim at 'emphatic clarity of representation', see Paul de Man's discussion of Hegel in 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion', in de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1996), ed. and intro. Andrzej Warminski, pp. 51-2.
14. Other criticisms of Owens' distinction can be found in works as different as Melville's 'Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory' and Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Reaktion Books: London, 1994).
15. The symbol is the rhetorical figure of 'throwing together' (sum-ballein), allegory that of 'other-speaking' (allos-agorcuein).
16. Helga Geyer-Ryan, Fables of Desire (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1994), p. 199.
17. Both Benjamin and de Man emphasize a temporal rather than a spatial grasp of disjunction.
18. Bainard Cowan, for instance, claimed that Adorno and, subsequently, Rolf Tiedemann were responsible for putting a Hegelian gloss on an essentially anti-Hegelian project. See Bainard Cowan, 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory', New German Critique, no. 22, Winter 1981, pp. 109-22.
19. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 208, p. 198.
20. From now on, unless otherwise stated, all references to Benjamin are to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In the text I refer to this work as the Trauerspiel.
21. Benjamin, p. 195.
22. Benjamin, p. 187.
23. Benjamin, p. 160.
24. Benjamin, p. 165-6, p. 189.
25. Benjamin, pp. 174-5.
26. Benjamin, p. 189.
27. Benjamin, p. 191.
28. Benjamin, p. 192.
29. Benjamin, p. 197.
30. Benjamin, 'Central Park', New German Critique, vol. 34, 1985, p. 38. The notes making up 'Central Park' were collected under this title from 1939 to 1940.
31. Benjamin, 'Central Park', p. 36.
32. Benjamin, p. 183.
33. Benjamin, p. 176.
34. Benjamin, p. 201.
35. Benjamin, p. 209.
36. Benjamin, p. 208.
37. Benjamin, pp. 209-10.
38. Benjamin, pp. 234-5.
39. Benjamin, p. 161.
40. De Man, 'Reading (Proust)', p. 57.
41. In this sense, certain dialectical accounts - and Adorno springs to mind - may come closer to this version of deconstruction than much self-professed deconstruction. An alternate reading would be to say that de Man is more Hegelian than dcconstructive. The labels here - and the invocation to choose between, or allocate different accounts to, them - fail to respond adequately to the material. Jameson goes as far as to argue that de Man and Derrida 'have nothing whatsoever to do with each other', the latter being preoccupied with how to imagine the unimaginable, inaccessible, radical difference, with how to pose in language a pre-linguistic moment, the former with 'the birth of abstraction and indeed philosophical conccptuality as such'. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (Verso: London and New York, 1991), p. 225, p. 227.
42. Norris parallels de Manian deconstruction with Adornian negative dialectics: 'Deconstruction is indeed a form of negative dialectics, an activity that carries on the project of immanent or self-reflective critique developed by Hegel out of Kant, but which turns this project against its own desire for such premature endpoints as Symbol or Absolute Reason'. See Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (Routlcdge: New York and London, 1988), p. 61.
43. The role of these photographic reproductions is, I think, significant for the account although I do not pursue it here. For the sake of simplicity, and to avoid the inevitable mise-en-abyme, I refer simply to the fresco.
44. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1 (Penguin Books: London, 1983), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p. 88.
45. Proust, Remembrance, p. 89.
46. De Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement' (1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia University Press: New York, 1984), p. 81.
47. De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality', p. 208-28.
48. Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse', part 2, p. 62.
49. De Man, 'Form and Intent in the American New Criticism', Blindness and Insight, p. 34.
50. This might follow from the widely discussed anthropological readings of the masterslave dialectic.
51. Fletcher, Allegory, p. 159, p. 341.
52. Honig, Dark Conceit, p. 68.
53. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 68.
54. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 1994), trans. Patrick Camiller, pp. 76-7.
55. Benjamin, p. 198.
56. Benjamin, p. 199.
57. Benjamin, p. 200, p. 201.
58. Benjamin, p. 173.
59. Benjamin, p. 206. Cf. Benjamin's discussion of the Baroque's - and the present's - 'so-called decadence' in the 'Epistemo-Critical Prologue' (Benjamin, pp. 54-5).
60. Benjamin, p. 232. A similar emphasis runs throughout the established literature on allegory. For Quilligan, for instance, allegory questions 'culture's assumptions about the ability of language to state or reveal value' not to sink into the 'infinite regressions' of linguistic self-referentiality but to provoke a move beyond (Quilligan, p. 221, p. 278).
61. Benjamin, p. 232.
62. The critique of 'negativistic quiet' comes from 'Left-Wing Melancholy. (On Erich Kästner's new book of poems)', Screen, no. 2, Summer 1974, p. 30.
63. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures', p. 52.
64. See Benjamin, "The Author as Producer' (1934), Understanding Brecht (New Left Books: London, 1973), trans. Anna Bostock, pp. 85-103.
65. Buchloh, for instance, registers some unease with presenting the paradigm of Rosler as a solution, suggesting that her work, due to its very externality, is subject to a certain impotence.
66. De Man, 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion', p. 52.
67. Norris, Paul de Man, p. 78. 'Rhetoric may figure as the problematic term, the aspect of language that complicates the move from phenomenal perception to concepts of pure understanding. But it can exert this deconstructive leverage only in so far as it remains an activity of thought closely in touch with epistemology and critical reason' (p. 94).
68. De Man, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, Summer 1982, p. 771. This essay is reprinted in Aesthetic Ideology.
69. De Man, 'Sign and Symbol', p. 773.
70. Benjamin, p. 177.
71. Benjamin, p. 175.
72. Benjamin, p. 232. Cf. Hegel on 'looking the negative in the face', a passage favoured by Adorno (note the epigraph to Minima Moralia).
73. Indeed, Benjamin argues that destruction is idealized by the symbol. Allegory, in contrast, addresses 'the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape' (Benjamin, p. 166).
74. De Man, 'Reading History', The Resistance to Theory (University of Manchester Press: Manchester, 1986), p. 70.
75. The phrase is Tim Clark's - the title of a session from the Annual Conference of the College Arts Association in 1994 - although it should be noted that he endows it with a doubtful tone: 'A De Manian Art History?'.
76. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 1986, p. 95) ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (entry for 18 January 1926).
77. Benjamin, p. 233.