<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p> 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.</p></abstract>

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

Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University

American, British and Canadian Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

{"article-title":"Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin\u2019s Allegorical Method"}

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...

Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

Published Online: Feb 12, 2016

Page range: 37 - 59

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2015-0007

Keywords
Allegory, Walter Benjamin, postmodernism, theology, messianism, dialectics, deconstruction, constellation, ruin, Trauerspiel

© ABC Studies, Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Remapping the Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Method

Published Online: Feb 12, 2016

Page range: 37 - 59

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2015-0007

KeywordsAllegory, Walter Benjamin, postmodernism, theology, messianism, dialectics, deconstruction, constellation, ruin, Trauerspiel

© ABC Studies, Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Keywords
Allegory, Walter Benjamin, postmodernism, theology, messianism, dialectics, deconstruction, constellation, ruin, Trauerspiel