Allegory by Paul de Man

Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and De Man on the Function of Allegory
Author(s): Jim Hansen

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp.
663-683
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Formalism and Its Malcontents:
and de Man on the
Benjamin
Function of Allegory*
Jim Hansen
The very opposition between knowledge which
penetrates from without and that which bores

from within becomes suspect to the dialectical
method, which sees in it a symptom of precisely
that reification which the dialectic is obliged to
accuse.
?Theodor Adorno, "Cultural
Criticism and Society"
Formalism is evidently making a comeback in North American

literary criticism. After facing decades of apparent exile at the
successive hands of the structuralists of the late 1960s, the
poststructuralists of the 1970s and 1980s, and the various historicist
schools of the 1990s, the formalist analysis of aesthetic tropes appears to
have returned to the academic scene. In a recent issue of
post-2000
PMLA, W. J. T. Mitchell interrogates the term's longstanding use as a
pejorative while simultaneously affirming his own "commitment to
form."1 Mitchell warns us that this new formalism, a far more subtle,
sober, and erudite than its much-derided ancestor the New
approach
Criticism, shares many of the aims of historicism and
ideology-critique.
Moreover, Mitchell argues, throughout the critical debates of the last
few decades, formalism has "continued to rear its head, even when most
fervently disavowed."2 Similarly, in a special issue of Modern Language

Quarterly, Ellen Rooney claims that "formalism is an unavoidable mo
ment in the projects of both literary and cultural studies."3 Like
Mitchell, many of new formalism's most ardent and thoughtful defend
ers tend to list theorists and politically savvy thinkers like Fredric
Jameson, Edward Said, and Theodor Adorno as critics whose formalist
*
I would like to thank the following people who helped with the essay: Jed Esty, Erich P.
Hertz, Michael Rothberg, Mark Christian Thompson, Ren?e R. Trilling, Fergus Clinker,
and the students from my graduate seminar on Frankfurt School Aesthetics from the
spring of 2004.
New Literary History, 2005, 35: 663-683

664 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
readings score political points. We are reminded that if a respected and

nuanced critic like Jameson imports formalism into his Marxism, then
formalism must not be all that bad. To my way of thinking, this kind of
defensive reading of formalist techniques fails to think through the
division between formalism and historicism. That is, perhaps an imma
nent critique of formalism, a critique that takes up and
actually deploys
formalism's logic, should begin by asking what iswrong with formalism,
where does its own internal logic collapse, and what separates ideologi
cally inflected historicism from a critique circumscribed by questions of
aesthetic form in the first place? Obviously, these are not so much new
as are rewarmed versions of the familiar that has
questions they aporia
kept philosophy professors up at night at least since G. W. F. Hegel's
content- and Aesthetics Immanuel Kant's
history-driven challenged pro
nouncement that art was autotelic or without For
"purposiveness purpose."4
in other words, formalism has been a matter of
modernity, always theory.
This is all to say that if, as Mitchell suggests, academic criticism is
entering the age of a "new kind of formalism," I do not think
certainly
that anyone suspects it will resemble either the traditionalist science of
meaning one sees in the New Criticism or even the more sophisticated
literary-historical/evolutionary model proposed by Russian formalism.5
Neither is it likely that any sort of contemporary and critically astute
academic formalism will to teach us to the inherent
try recognize
aesthetic of certain forms. the we are far more
beauty Quite contrary,
likely to see formalisms indebted to postmodern modalities of suspicion

and to the heteromorphic conceptions of historicism and discourse
analysis that this suspicion has engendered over the last thirty years.
Generally speaking, formalism has been taken by a generation of
politically informed and historicist critics to be the other of ideological
criticism. If, however, immanent conceals a that
critique always politics,
politics need not necessarily be aligned with conservative forces. In fact,

claiming that all formalisms are reactionary would be an insight of such
formalism that even the most
purely metaphysical vulgar left-Hegelian
could denounce it as insufficiently historicized. Nevertheless, contempo
rary critics might well fear that even supple and reflective formalist
lead, at best, to something like a diffident quietism.
practices
Rather than constructing a list of political critics who recur to
formalism, I would like to look to two critics who often begin with
formalism to end as its malcontents, its various
only up articulating
philosophical, social, and aesthetic paradoxes. In the writings of Walter

Benjamin and Paul de Man, we see two thinkers who both attempted to
redeem that clumsiest and most belabored of formal devices: allegory,
the of an idea in a character or an emblem. Formalist
embodying
were as central to as were to de Man's.
practices Benjamin's project they

FORMALISM AND ITS MALCONTENTS 665
For his part, Benjamin seemed so committed to teasing out the aesthetic
and dialectical implications of allegory that it remained central to his
critical vocabulary even after his epistemo-theological thinking had
been called into question by his conversion to Marxism. On the other
hand, the de Manian conception of allegory remains suspicious both of
the totalizing claims implicit in ideology-critique and of the "politiciz
ing" of art that Benjamin himself had once advocated.6 For de Man,
allegory gradually became the key rhetorical figure in a
particularly
relentless strain of deconstruction. In his writing, allegory marks out the
space of the failure of referential meaning, the space in which, as he
"does not stand in the service of that
explains, representation something
can be In other words, about a ham
represented."7 early speculation
handed formal feature
provided something of a foundation for the kind
of provocative micrological and materialist work that we see Benjamin
doing throughout his later writings, particularly in Das Passagen-Werk
(The Arcades Project) and the work on Charles Baudelaire. Likewise, in
discussing that same formal feature in his notorious 1969 essay "The
Rhetoric of Temporality," de Man initiates the kind of ascetic, negative
that would come to characterize both his conception of the
reading
finitude of human agency and his inveterate resistance to referential
and empirical meaning. In the work of Benjamin and de Man on
then, we witness two of nu
allegory, contrasting species theoretically
anced literary criticism that not only deploy formalist strategies, but also
actually begin and end with the consideration of aesthetic form, with
what we might call the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, the
internal and the external.8 When read each other,
against Benjamin's
messianic to and de Man's of
approach allegory conception allegorical
reading provide contrasting models of the political and/or theoretical
interventions that a criticism reliant on the formal, the or
tropological,
the carefully measured generic category can make. I believe that in their
separate techniques for engaging with or displacing the dialectic of
immanence and transcendence, and de Man that
Benjamin suggest any
contemporary type of formalism is always already itself an allegory of

larger philosophical or social problems. In fact, I will argue that any
formalism to enter into or resituate current academic debates
seeking
must start by negotiating the dialectic
and transcendence of immanence
and by acknowledging how formalism itself invariably becomes a way of
thinking beyond form. In the end, we should be able to formulate the
theoretical boundaries
for any "new" formalism by suggesting that a
Benjaminian kind of politicizing formalism can be used to criticize a de
Manian nihilistic formalism while de Manian skepticism can, likewise, be
deployed to nuance the potentially reifying nostalgia that appears to
haunt
Benjamin's approach.

II. The Dialectical Problem of Formalism
Simply put, formalisms, both old and new, approach the artwork's
immanent or internal architecture. As this often-told tran
story goes,
scendent criticism, extratextual in its
always already aspirations, neglects
in an effort to focus on ethical, communal, or
particularity Utopian,
social generalities. Immanent criticism avoids such teleological agenda
setting by simply explicating the text and surveying its often very
nuanced structuring principles. Of course, from a Marxist, feminist, or
postcolonial perspective, immanent criticism stands accused of neglect
ing the ideological and the historical entirely and of deploying its critical
with some to scientific At the risk of
vocabulary pretense authority.
oversimplifying, then, we might say that the critical alternatives are

either confronting the internal structure of an art object by analyzing its
maneuvers, its coherence or incoherence, and its rhetorical
stylistic
or else maintaining an external or identity position from which
figures,
to read a culture's products and call the whole of that culture into
with to its With immanent criticism we get the
question regard ideology.
fetishizing of the object itself and, implicitly, the notion of an abstract,
ahistorical meaning that is always readily available to an interpreting
subject who always appears suspiciously impervious to anything resem
or false consciousness. With transcendent criticism we
bling prejudice
often an extorted form of reconciliation in which are
get objects
subsumed under universal-historical as transcendent
principles, critique
pursues its overt goal of positive social change. In its most nuanced
formulations, however, immanent negates the universal-histori
critique
cal an of the inconsistencies and
through analysis particular object's
ambiguities.
The opposition between the immanent and the transcendent so
central to what we call literary criticism is, to Theodor Adorno's way of
of reified consciousness in that it fails to see how
thinking, symptomatic
form is always already imbricated with the sociohistorical. Adorno tells
us in Prisms that any "truly dialectical" criticism must subscribe to both
methods to neither.9 Each side of the dialectic
and remains enfolded
inextricably into its other. If we take it for granted that Adorno is
correct, as someone like Mitchell certainly does, we still have to
determine how particular breeds of formalism attempt to
precisely
rethink or even to sublimate this dialectic and to what ends. Of course,
for Adorno or Utopian aesthetic
but, criticism is not abandoned
political
rather, kept alive by being thought negatively. That is, the transcendent
and the immanent at once meet and are kept at bay by a critical method
that points to the internal contradictions of a work of art-^a-object as

historical, cultural, and social contradictions. The artwork

embodying
falls short where the social world from which it springs falls short.
For Benjamin and de Man allegory works precisely as a formal feature
that embodies historical contradictions or
ontological problems, respec
tively. In either case, and indeed in nearly any formalist critique,

what transcendent aims the critic advocates can be
determining actually
achieved by establishing the critic figures the finite boundary
how of
immanent form as a reflection of the sociohistorical or philosophical
finitude of human understanding and practice tout court. Explicitly,
formalism towards boundaries, towards that which cannot
always points
a line past which critical consciousness
be discussed, always draws
trespasses only at the risk of projecting a potentially mythic or totalitar
ian order on an world. formalism conceals
already existing Implicitly,
certain about that order and its role in
assumptions preexisting creating
the possibility for human action and critical theory in the first place.
Even when Kant, arch-formalist, describes the immanent
modernity's
concerns of a reflective judgment, he claims that in such judgments one
by meditating on a particular object for which "the universal has

begins
to be found."10 In other words, even a most and
circumspect rigorously
formalism relies on or moves towards certain
skeptical ontological
It seems to me, then, that any dialectical" evaluation of
assumptions. "truly
the different breeds of formalism must read each approach's explicit claims
its We must ask what transcendent aims are
against implicit assumptions.
immanent the very end near
implicit in any given critique. Coincidently,
of his career, de Man engaged with Benjamin's work on this very subject.
III. Formalism and the Question of Historicity
At first glance, de Man's methodology, predicated on poststructuralist

discourse analysis, the cautious teasing out of philosophic and linguistic
paradoxes, and the foregrounding of something like undecidability,
much more amenable to our own and theoretical
appears literary
practice than the often theologically inflected approach taken by

someone like Benjamin. As late as the 1979 Allegories of Reading, de Man
had casually dismissed Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel
(Origin of the German Mourning Play) for remaining too Hegelian in its
dialectics and too teleological in its attempt to define allegory and map
the terrain of romanticism.11 In other words, Benjamin's critique, blind
to its own situatedness and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), remains too
transcendental, too willing to remain outside of history and attack the
whole of romantic consciousness because of its and divisions.
fragments
De Man's offhanded criticism of Benjamin might easily be overlooked,

but itmarks a key difference between a poststructuralist to the

approach
question of form and one inflected Frankfurt School aesthetics.
by
Following various Heideggerian schools of thought, de Man fore
grounds the philosophical concept of historicity. If historicity, conceived
of as the unavoidable "situatedness" of the interpreting subject in a
context or discourse, circumscribes what Heideggerian thinkers call the
"horizons of understanding," if Geschichtlichkeit is, as Heidegger claims in
Being and Time, "prior to what is called history," then it forecloses on the
of transhistorical or universal-historical modes of sense
possibility
then, there can be no such as a transcendent
making.12 Ostensibly, thing
or teleological of "History," no ontological like
conception principle
freedom, revolution, theodicy, or identity to the of
guide dynamic
"History." Following this logic, as de Man explains in "Form and Intent
in American New Criticism," "to understand something is to realize that
one had always known it, but at the same time, to face the
mystery of this
hidden knowledge. can be called complete
Understanding only when it
becomes aware of its own In
temporal predicament."13 poststructuralist
thinking, the interpreter, subject to and constructed by the vicissitudes
of structural and linguistic phenomena like diff?rance, finds him/herself
bounded by the hermeneutic circle circumscribed by historicity. From
this perspective, Benjamin's approach to the problem of form, which
ideas like "revelation," and "truth-content,"
foregrounds "originality,"
seems to retain those extrinsic, dialectical
precisely Hegelian-Marxist
maneuvers that de Man sees as
potentially totalizing.
Oddly enough, however, in his 1982 introduction to Hans Robert
Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic ofReception, de Man seems to have changed his
tune as he associates the Trauerspiel book's notion of allegory with the
disruptive force of figurai language. Now, Benjamin gets grouped
with deconstruction's favorite arch-debunker of
together metaphysical
and referential truth, Nietzsche.14 Likewise, in the last of the Messenger
Lectures that de Man delivered at Cornell in 1983, he goes so far as to
say of Benjamin's 1923 essay "The Task of the Translator" that "in the
profession you are nobody unless you have said about this
something
text" (73).15 As with his various interpretations of Nietzsche, de Man
to read as a a flouter of transcen
began Benjamin protodeconstructor,
dent and Utopian criticism. De Man is characteristically attentive to the
delicate aporias of Benjamin's essay, and language certainly appears to
have as resolutely an antisubjectivist feel in Benjamin's "Translator" essay
as it has in much of de Man's post-1968 work. After all,
Benjamin begins
his piece by telling us, "no poem is intended for the reader," and that
does not communicate or information.16 Here,
language impart any
Benjamin's thinking seems to partake of the kind of immanent criti

cism?conscious of its own situatedness?that de Man fosters, a criticism

that does not work to resolve inconsistency through the fiat of some
or extrinsic Rather, in de Man's
Utopian, teleological, harmony. reading,
Benjamin's thought outlines how the inconsistencies of figures of

and reflect the internal structures of
speech referentiality language.
Does this mean that, contra de Man's own claim in Allegories of Reading,
Benjamin's Trauerspiel book is not blind to its own Geschichtlichkeit?
Appended to de Man's lecture is a particularly illuminating question
and-answer session. disconcerted de Man's
Apparently by arguments,
Dominick La Capra explains to de Man that "on the left today, I think
Benjamin is being introduced as someone who gives us all of the ... all
of the subtlety of contemporary French criticism, with a political
dimension that's very much identified with messianic hope."17 De Man
retorts that critical are resistant to messianism,
quickly Benjamin's powers
that "Benjamin would be closer to Nietzsche than he is to a messianic
tradition which he spent his whole life holding at bay" (103). Beware all
messianic of he warns, for "that way madness
interpretations Benjamin,
lies" (103). Of course, here all political readings seem to dovetail nicely
with the messianic ones. If de Man always preferred the immanent,
to criticism over what he saw as the "salvational" and
negating approach
transcendent of an criticism, then some
pretensions overtly political
where between 1979 and 1982 he seemed to discover a Benjamin who
agreed.18 But what if de Man's 1979 characterization of Benjamin's
thought is, quite accidentally, as accurate as his 1982 Perhaps
depiction?
Benjamin's rethinking of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence
to one of de Man's an "irrefutable
provides, appropriate pet phrases,
critique by anticipation" of the de Manian approach to the problem of
form.19 In de Man and in Benjamin, formalism becomes the way for
modern thought to negotiate the problem of historicity, but Benjamin's
peculiar, dialectical disposition towards aesthetic form maintains both
the transcendent and immanent at once, or, that is to it
positions say,
enfolds the transcendent into the immanent while de Man's approach
deconstructs the transcendent via the immanent.
IV.An Allegorical Formalism
For both thinkers negation is the task of modern critical conscious

ness. Hence, both Benjamin's Trauerspiel book and de Man's "Rhetoric
of Temporality" speculate about literary meaning by staking a claim for
the negating immanence of allegory over and against the mythic and
universalizing implications of its more popular sibling, the symbol. If
formalism is to survive, it must itself become allegorical. That is,
formalist reading must become an allegory for larger, sociohistorical

contradictions and/or ontological problems. As the key figure for tragic

pathos, the symbol transmutes that which has been lost within the
context of an individual work of art into an eternal, indivisible, and
an instant,
essential unity. Lost for it is recovered and recoverable
forever. Symbols long for transcendence in the most overt and na?ve
sense. They project a mythic, ideal order. In "The Rhetoric of Temporal
ity," de Man argues that with the advent of romanticism the symbol,
"conceived as an of between the and
expression unity representative
semantic functions of becomes a that underlies
language, commonplace
literary taste, literary criticism, and literary history."20 Derived from the
mythic movement of tragedy, the symbol provides an idealizable teleol
ogy. As an artistic trope that also philosophizes, itworks to overcome the
immanence-transcendence dialectic by reconciling material form to
transcendental ideal. For Benjamin, the critical emphasis on symbolism
and, subsequently, the teleological unity of form and content, erases the
distinction between the transcendental and the material, appearance
and essence, subject and object. In rather undialectical ways, symbols
conceal contextual, or referential conflict con
actively sociological, by
universal and continuums. In
structing imperatives Benjamin's thought,
and here he is followed closely by de Man, the romantic conception of
the symbol posits the beautiful as the true and, likewise, as the truly
moral. Any formalism founded on and tied to this romantic theory of
the symbol?and we might place New Criticism in this category?masks
similar transcendent aims. That which is symbolic, autotelic and unified
in-itself, also to be absolute in a sense. The
pretends metaphysical
similarity here between the powers of the symbol and those claimed for
the post-Kantian Enlightened subject are not simply coincidental. They
are both forms that get posited as preexisting the historical. In preexist
ing history, they also appear to define and guide it. Finally, then, the
acts as a kind of a priori undialectical totality. In their critical
symbol
works, both de Man and Benjamin oppose the kind of overtly
transhistorical claims made by such a notion of the symbol. The symbol
subsists as a form that denies its historicity, where form can actually only
exist in and reflect its own historicity. Formal attention to allegory
becomes a self-consciously micrological way of articulating the underly
ing macroproblems of modernity.
Let's not forget that allegory, regularly dismissed by romantic critics as
fragmentary, anachronistic, and unpoetic, is something of a linguistic
trick, an emblem or that refers to an
representation unrepresentable
idea. Artworks inwhich characters appear to simply and unproblematically
virtue or lust seem, at the least, a bit forced. The
embody always very
of is never as subtle, as timeless, or as beautiful as
clumsy sphere allegory
the well-wrought world of the symbol. In his Trauerspiel book, Benjamin

explains that allegory embodies the paradoxical structure of a profane

and world because under or
bourgeois allegory's auspices any person
object can become an emblem of absolutely anything else. In the

of then, as further claims, we view a world
language allegory, Benjamin
"in which detail is of no great importance."21 Later, in The Arcades Project,
he will go on to claim that "allegories stand for that which the
makes of the have in this
commodity experiences people century."22
Where the symbol erases the distinction between matter (or form) and
transcendence, allegory foregrounds precisely this distinction because
as a form it is so forced and excessive, so about human
unashamedly
consciousness to dominate or to evade matter and nature. In
struggling
other words, allegory's failure actively underscores the gulf between
matter and transcendence by foregrounding the conflict between artis
tic form and transcendent or theological intention. pro
Allegory
nounces a judgment upon the profane world by translating that world's
erasure of the specific detail into a formal feature of art.
For modern does not idealize but, rather, mourns.23
Benjamin allegory
Allegory subsists as the mournful trope that embodies as it acknowledges

the loss of specificity, originality, and revelation. With this insight into
the structure of allegory in modernity, the Trauerspiel book anticipates
the kind of aesthetic-historical thinking that Benjamin will later advo
cate through his conception of experience. In his much-discussed essay
"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin warns that Erfahrung (collec
tive, reflective, communal experience) has been replaced in modernity
by the more solitary Erlebnis (lived experience) ,24In the closing passage
of the essay he suggests that in the collision of structurally profane
imagery and mundane materiality that we find in Baudelaire's poetry, we
see the "nature of something lived through (Erlebnis) to which Baudelaire
has given the weight of experience (Erfahrung)" (194). To Benjamin's
way of Baudelaire's cannot recover us but,
thinking, poetry Erfahrungfor
rather, can offer us a critical simulacrum of its loss. This same
negative
critical maneuver is central to Benjamin's about allegory.
thinking
Baudelaire as broods and mourns a form of
allegorist upon experience
that is lost by depicting the failure, isolation, and horror of his
contemporary world. Allegory becomes the formal feature par excel
lence of the transient and the irretrievable. It points not to redemption,
but only to the Fall itself, only to the dated and the worldly. Hence its
function as an object is critical and mortifying rather than harmonizing
and reconciling. Benjamin encapsulates this distinction in the Trauerspiel
book by claiming that "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 fades
hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial Where the
landscape."25

a fixed point outside of the contingencies of history and

symbol presents
nature as eternal and unified, the emblem as a death
allegory presents
mask, as the face of that which has passed away. As Benjamin goes on to
tell us in The Arcades Project, certain epochs in human history that have
experienced
a "crisis of the aura," or, that is, eras that have stigmatized
the ideas of both distance and the cult value of the work of art "tend
toward allegorical expression" (J 77a, 8/365). Allegorical form itself,
then, is produced by certain kinds of historical crises.
Allegory is a similarly negating formal feature in de Man's work. As he
tells us in his own Allegory book, "allegorical narratives tell the story of
the failure to read."26 And certain kinds of self-conscious authors,
very
the Nietzsches, Rousseaus, and Prousts of the world, deploy the linguis
tic trickery that is allegorical form?a kind of substitutio ad absurdum?in
order to undermine utilitarian, or transhistorical
any simple, purpose
for their various writings. For de Man, these writers acknowledge their
own historicity by allegorizing unreadability itself. They represent the
collapse of transcendental signifieds. Putting it another way, de Man
argues, in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," that "the meaning constituted
the can then consist in the ... of a
by allegorical sign only repetition
previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is the essence of
the previous sign to be pure anteriority" (207). The linguistic context or
constructedness of an its situatedness, that
allegory, always collapses
to be or true. As
allegory's pretension transcendentally transhistorically
a critic, the trick is to be aware of this to see as de Man
aporia, allegory,
instructs us in Aesthetic Ideology, as the ironic "pseudoknowledge" of its
own impossibility.27 Where in Benjamin allegory reflected some histori
cal failure of or crisis in human perception en masse, in de Man it
reflects a deconstructive move on the of either a of or
part piece writing
an individual writer. Allegory, then, is always presented as an ethical
problem in de Man's work because it brings explicitly value-laden claims

about things like "virtue" or "falsehood" into conflict with their own
historicity. Writers sufficiently attuned to the nuances of language's
historicity appear capable of realizing allegory not as truth but, rather, as
an indication of the truth's ineluctable failure to be anything other than
rhetorical and Simply put, then, in opposition
situated. to the symbol,
allegory consciously points to its own temporality and, in so doing,
embarrasses its own claims to truth. De Man's rethinking of the
immanence-transcendence dialectic begins with the individuated prob
lems inherent in form and then leaps directly to larger structural and
ontological metaproblems. In the process the space that mediates
between these extremes, the space of collectivity, gets occluded by de
Manian criticism, which seems to suspect that collectivity is always
subject to a kind of intransigent and totalizing conformity.

In Benjamin and de Man on allegory, then, we have two basic

formulations of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence. For
the artwork's immanence seems to external

Benjamin, embody
sociohistorical problems, and for de Man, the internal incoherences
that manifest themselves in form are indicative of the larger problems
associated with historical situatedness. In both cases, formalist analysis
uncovers failure. If, as I claimed earlier, even the most
circumspect
and
skeptical formalism relies on certain ontological assumptions, what

different kinds of ontological underwrite the formalisms we
assumptions
see in Benjamin and de Man? Where are the respective boundaries of
finitude drawn and to what purpose? In Benjamin's Trauerspiel book,
finitude ismarked by the dialectic of Natur-Geschichte (natural history).
In de Man, the finite is delineated by an ontological principle that we
might call discursive historicity.
V. Natural History or Discursive Historicity
As a number of critics have indicated over the years, by championing

the allegorical fragment over the mythic aspirations of the symbol,
Benjamin takes aim at those pretensions of modern subjectivity that
grow out of idealism's claims to totality.28 To Benjamin's way of thinking,
the subject can neither precede nor provide a teleology for history. His
thinking prepares the way for what Adorno will come to call Vorrang des
Objekts, the preponderance of the object.29 A criticism focusing on the
Geschichte rather than the Verstehen (under
object's (history), subject's
standing) ,works to disrupt the normal and accepted order of idealist

and culture. In a sense, Benjamin knocks the modern
philosophy
subject off of its philosophical and cultural pedestal. In The German
Ideology, Marx argues that idealist philosophies generally seek to explain
away pesky things like materiality and empirical history.30 In fact, for
Marx the tradition of philosophical idealism actually reads material
history as merely a result of ideal history. History gets replaced by the
or the "history of understanding,"
"history of philosophy" individuals
are transformed into "consciousness," and like "nature" or the
things
"material world" are either renounced as unreachable or understood
simply and undialectically as the "objects of consciousness." For Marx,

this theoretical maneuver makes idealism a very heady, but finally
politically vacuous, philosophy. Of course, to Marxian ways of thinking,
if a philosophy replaces politics with abstraction it does so at the price of
shoring up the status quo and supporting reified social relations.
even in its corre
Intuitively, pre-Marxian phase, Benjamin's thinking
sponds to Marx's insights here. Throughout the Trauerspiel book,

Benjamin develops a theory of the Natur-Geschichte (natural history)

dialectic that shares Marx's suspicions about abstract philosophy. 31
This
dialectic measures out the limit of human finitude for Benjamin. The
continual nuancing of the concept of historicity might, in some sense,
be read as twentieth-century philosophy's rejoinder to Marx's criticism.
In contrast, a of form works neither to out nor
Benjaminian theory point
to expand horizons of understanding but, rather, to indicate that
human understanding is itself subject to a dialectic that can be neither
instrumentalized nor fully understood. That is, human understanding
and historicism must
be read together as only one side of the mutually
determining natural-history dialectic.
"It is by virtue of a strange combination of nature and history,"
Benjamin explains, "that the allegorical mode of expression is born."32
The imprint of Natur-Geschichte separates allegory from the Telos and
universalism of the symbol. The protestant baroque playwrights that
Benjamin studies in his Trauerspiel book view history as human and
profane. In their plays, nature, in all of its decay and transience,
becomes an allegory for a human history that is resolutely tied to the
ruin, the irreparably lost, the morbid.33 This is how allegory points to
Natur-Geschichte. It is an immanent problem of allegorical form, with all
its fixed, outdated, mundane that towards an external
meanings, points
or transcendent As on to
problem. Benjamin goes explain:
[T]he word stands written on the countenance of nature in the

"history"
characters of transience. The of the Natur-Geschichte-,
allegorical physiognomy
which is put on in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of a ruin.
stage
In the ruin has physically into the setting. And in this
history merged guise
history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of
irresistible declares itself to be
decay. Allegory thereby beyond beauty. Allegories
are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.34
If nature was the primary source for the Trauerspiel allegorists, and they
viewed nature as then written nature,
eternally decaying, history, upon
was always already decaying with it. Furthermore, if human history, like
nature, is transient and impermanent, then it is neither self-realizing
nor but, rather, and disunited. His
self-recovering always fragmentary
tory resembles something like a series of ruins, rather than a progressive

Geist or consciousness, and is much more mourned as a
accurately
collection of lost and defeated cultures than celebrated as a triumphal
procession from the past into the future. As such, in allegory, material
form itself, which is moribund, can never reconcile with transcen
always
dental ideal, can never be Rather, it is a marker of
permanent.
and loss.
impermanence

Where the symbol had pointed beyond history and towards ontologi
cal truths, allegorical form, so dated and lifeless, points towards the
ruin's place in what Benjamin calls the Jetzt, "the now of contemporary
The ruin exists as ruin in the and, as
actuality."35 present, Benjamin
further explains, ruins are the "formal elements" of works of art (182).
The baroque allegorists "pile" these ruins and fragments, these allegori
cal and "remnants," on of each other without strict
"stereotypes" top any
or goal (178). Literature, in turn, does not embody the
teleology
autotelic art of creation but rather, as an "ars
Benjamin explains,
inveniendi," "the art of and the of more and
finding" fragments, accruing
more serves to the artwork's sense of
fragments only intensify mourning
and loss, its persistent yet miserable denunciation of totality (179).36 In
1940 Benjamin will reenvision this idea writ large in his final piece, the
"Theses on the Philosophy of History," where he depicts Paul Klee's
Angelas Novus observing with great horror a catastrophic history that
There, on to warn that
piles "wreckage upon wreckage."37 Benjamin goes
the tradition of the lost and the "oppressed" should teach us to
the inherent in our "now-moment" or
recognize dangers contemporary
Jetztzeit (257). The ruins of the past teach us to recognize and critique
the present. Similarly, allegories from past works of art teach us that our
own ideas and circumstances are, like nature, and
invariably transitory
subject to decay. Benjamin extrapolates from allegorical form a theory

of human finitude. Allegory's apparently arbitrary linking of an
unrepresentable idea to a material emblem indicates that the idea itself
was dialectically enfolded into a material history strewn with similarly
transient ideas. we are to remember, is written on transient
History,
nature, and, represents the irrecoverable loss of
subsequently, allegory
the object's originary sense. Allegory historicizes itself, and immanent
critique, then, becomes an allegorical method for discussing and
meditating on lost forms. Formalism itself becomes allegorical.
From an attempt to differentiate Trauerspiel allegory from tragic
symbolism, Benjamin goes on to develop a theory of allegorical percep
tion that calls modernity's various notions of progress and historicism
into question. Part of allegory's critical function is to awaken us to the
current historical moment. The arc of Benjamin's theory of forms is
finally sociocritical as to Discussion of the art
opposed epistemological.
immanent architectural inconsistencies and failures leads out
object's
ward to observations about cultural and historical failures. As Benjamin
himself claims in his December 9, 1923, letter to Florens Christian Rang,
"the same forces that become explosively and extensively temporal in
the world of revelation (and this is what history is) appear concentrated
in the silent world (and this is the world of nature and of works of art)."38
Political criticism is preserved here by being thought negatively. It does

not to "the but, rather, to a In a dialectical

point way" problem.
maneuver that almost seems more like a M?bius an immanent
strip,
actually transforms into a sophisticated, form of

critique negative
transcendent criticism.
De Man's method of allegorical reading, on the other hand, seeks to

cure North American formalism of its na?vet? about the problem of
historicity. As de Man sees it in "Form and Intent in American New
Criticism," the patient and nuanced attention that New Critics paid to
the reading of form succumbed to a kind of fetishism by mistaking the
Heideggerian hermeneutic circle for "the organic circularity of natural
(29). Their was, at least in an intuitive sense,
processes" practice
auspicious for its negativity, its dual focus on ambivalence and paradox,
but the New Critics themselves remained uninformed about what de
Man calls "the epistemological nature of all interpretation" (29). They
failed to see that aesthetic formalism leads inevitably to certain ontologi
cal questions about the possibility of transcendent knowledge. They
mistook forms, which negate truth, for the truth as such. De Man's
criticism places Heideggerian notions of Geschichtlichkeit, along with
much of the subsequent French poststructuralist theories of discursive
Geschichtlichkeit, adjacent to New Critical formalism. He formulates a self
aware "new" New Criticism, an immanent conscious of its
critique
ontological implications restrictions.39 As he claims in Allegories of
and
Reading, his criticism acknowledges that language is rhetorical rather
than representational (106). That is, de Manian allegorical reading
becomes so vigilant that itmistrusts itself. Through a notion of allegory
as failed reading, de Man finds a way to see the rhetorical, situated, or
functions of language as evidence of historicity, and the
performative
and artists he esteems invariably allegorize this same
philosophers
Form points to the finitude of human sense
ontological problem.
making and the falsity of teleological conceptions of history. "The
Truth" gets replaced by contextual and discursive truths of various
hermeneutic circles. Of course, claiming that all truth is contextual is
also making a truth-claim, but for de Man this is a truth-claim that
acknowledges its own finitude. It is, in other words, a negative truth
claim. Such claims, he believes, always already preempt the messianic
and political ones that totalize on the one hand while ignoring historic
on the other. An intractable formalism, then, leads de Man to think
ity
the problem of historical consciousness ontologically. Discursive histo
ricity acts as the negative ontological principle of de Manian critique.
Of course, in thinking the problem of material-history dialectically,
acts at once to and to the
Benjamin's approach acknowledge critique
hermeneutic circle created by the problem of historicity. In other words,
can never be an ontological principle for Benjamin
historicity-an-sich

because his thinking on allegory, which draws heavily from his 1916
essay "On Language as Such and on the of Man," argues that
Language
nature is "overnamed" human that in human
by language, language,
nature is made to fit different human needs,
continually continually
instrumentalized.40 In thinkers as different as de Man,
poststructuralist
Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and others, nothing precedes discourse,
or, at the very least, anything that precedes discourse becomes subject to
the play of language as soon as we attempt to render it intelligible.
Hence, "nature" is not one can discuss in any real sense. But
something
for Benjamin understanding and the like, those which
things through
consciousness situates itself and becomes situated in time, are one
only
half of a dialectical equation. Philosophical notions of historicity often
acknowledge this limit by concentrating on how consciousness, subject
to and constructs and
signifying systems, techniques, practices, gets
constructed a context, worldview, or form of life.
by
In "On Language as Such," Benjamin argues that "it is no longer
conceivable, as the view of that the word
bourgeois language maintains,
has an accidental relation to the object," and he goes on to claim that
"language never gives mere sign (69). In Benjamin's theory of language,
nature serves as the dialectical to and
necessary counterpoint history
understanding. From this perspective, the poststructuralist notion of
discursive historicity reads like a move that embraces some of the
instrumental qualities of language or as a philosophical maneuver that
occludes the natural From such a
through overnaming. perspective,
nature, like allegory, merely represents an object-world in which detail,
and revelation are of no
origin, authenticity, great importance. Allegory
points to a profane world, but allegorical reading embraces that world
by limiting criticism to the discursive analysis of epistemological issues.
While on the poststructuralist hand we have the fear of the
authorizing
original and of the transhistorical claim to truth upon which it draws, on
the other, tacitly modernist, hand, represented here by Benjamin, we
have the fear of the copy and of the counterfeit world it endlessly re
produces. For Benjamin the controlling anxiety seems to be the night
mare vision of a
society of such thoroughgoing false consciousness that
the representative, the mythic, the iconic, or the fetishistic has come to
reign over the actual. That is, as Marx would no doubt see it, a
philosophical theory of language takes unrestrained priority over, and in
many instances occludes, material Nature itself becomes
actively reality.
second to Nature takes whatever name
always already signifying systems.
that humans deem fit to give it and remains mute. But for Benjamin
nature's silence annunciates a of human under
mournfully critique
standing and of instrumental modes of reason. Careful reveal
allegorists
a Nature that forces us to acknowledge that human history is transient,

and decadent. If we the Natur-Geschichte dialectic,

profane, recognize
however, we the loss of rather than its
recognize meaning ontological
absence, and we recognize it in and for the Jetztzeit. This is an essentially
as opposed to an epistemological,
historical, insight. To put it simply,
Benjamin's formalism has more in common with the projects of
historicism and ideology-critique than with that of New Criticism.
Dialectically speaking, then, for Benjamin the transcendent or endur
an art
ing truth-content of allegorical work of is reached only through a
of that work's own transient as cultural ruin. Form
recognition position
decays historically. Its truth is its loss, its historical decay. If the ruin
continues to exist after its have been shed or lost, those
meanings
meanings display themselves as historical, as subject to both transitory
nature and to and Rather than to recover
politics power. attempting
what was eternal and beautiful about the work, the critic explores the
work as ruin, as failed, transient form. Criticism must show
precisely
that, and how, allegorical meanings have passed away. In the Trauerspiel
book Benjamin calls this critical activity the "mortification of the
works."41 The transcendent element of Benjamin's dialectic points
towards the finitude of a human history that is at once determined and
demythologized by its other, the natural. As an immanent form that
always collapses in the face of transcendent time, allegorical form calls
consciousness, and into It arrests
perception, understanding question.
But it is also to that nature is never a first
thought. important recognize
principle in itself for Benjamin because it is always involved in a dialectic
with history and, thus, is only open to us through history and language.
History and the historicity of understanding are
subject to nature, and
nature is acknowledged as a category subjectto historical thought.
Benjamin's insight into the Natur-Geschichte dialectic initiates the Frank
furt School critique of dominance that is perhaps best represented by
Adorno and Max Horkheimer's post-World War II philosophical mani
festo, Dialectic of Enlightenment.^
VI. Nostalgia and Lost Forms
Earlier, I claimed that formalism is generally thought to be the other

of political or historical criticism. If, however, as I have argued, formal
ism simply conceals its politics, it does not necessarily follow that those
politics will be reactionary or conservative. In the present state of the
academy, it seems much more likely that different kinds of formalism
will become the bases of different theoretical and historical approaches
to aesthetic and cultural politics. The key is to be able to discern which
ontological or historical principles are supported by our contemporary

brands of formalism. If such an that close

undertaking requires reading
always be paired with some kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, then one

version of this suspicion iswhat de Man advocates in books like Aesthetic
Ideology and The Resistance to Theory. In the latter, he warns that political
criticism often confuses "the materiality of the signifier with the materi
ality of what it signifies."43 The linguistic tricks and false realities
imagined in and by literary language, then, should teach us to see
itself as the ultimate as the "confusion of
ideology fiction, linguistic with
natural reality" (11). Ideology-critique is, in de Man's criticism, discred
ited by a formalist technique that unmasks all language as subject to the
same as Literature becomes a for
problems literary language. metonym
discursive historicity, and overtly historicist approaches to interpreting
literature are characterized as idealist and na?ve. One could
easily?and
to some degree justifiably?argue the kind of paradox-driven that
allegorical reading that de Man encourages makes nothing happen. In
his Principles of Literary Criticism, that inveterate moralist I. A. Richards
claimed long ago that attention to form averts misapprehensions and
certain kinds of interpretive biases.44 De Manian critique sees politics as
or, in other words, as the of our
"ideological mystification" grandest
various and biases.45 But
misapprehensions interpretive perhaps
formalism's trenchant fear of the "truth-claim" has
poststructuralist
been at once its most astute and most misdirected contribution to
critical In some sense, the threat formalism

theory. facing contemporary
is not that it will conceal reactionary politics in the guise of the truth
claim, but, rather, that it will become so immanent and so as to
skeptical
doubt the use or veracity of any kind of collectivity or political criticism,
that it will see all political critique as structurally totalitarian. To return
to Marx's insights from The German Ideology, such a criticism falls prey to
the same kind of thinking that allowed philosophical idealism to replace
with abstraction and, so, to shore the status in the first
politics up quo
place. Finally, Benjamin's gives us a model

criticism of formalism that
fights instrumental reason without giving up on In
ideology-critique.
fact, a formalism based on such a of allegory would see the
theory
struggle against instrumental reason as the most
significant work of any
circumspect and dialectical criticism. This is why Benjamin warns us in
the Trauerspiel book that "in the last analysis, structure and detail are
always historically charged. The object of philosophical criticism is to
show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical
content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a
philosophical truth."46 In this dialectic, form and history are mutually
determining and mutually demythologizing. Each always points beyond
itself and towards the other. Moreover, each towards loss and the
points
transience embodied nature.
by

like de Man's, notion of immanent has

Though, Benjamin's critique
the shape of negative truth, Benjamin's thought also invariably calls for
a criticism that begins with the mortification of the work of art and ends
by mortifying the structure of the social world from which that work
A subtle and reflective new formalism would be wise to do the
springs.
same. But formalism also seems to a
Benjamin's allegorical engender
kind of intransigent nostalgia for the lost. From a certain light Benjamin's
thinking seems less like historical materialism and more like the
melancholy political messianism that Rolf Tiedemann accuses it of
If a Benjaminian "mortification of the work" actually manifested
being.47
itself as a that devolved into a comfortable, conformist
nostalgia plea
sure in the lost, a tragic jouissance that took no critical account of the
current state of affairs, that saw no of the moment of
analogue present
danger in the dead

forms of the past, then that nostalgia should by all
means be subjected to the kind of skepticism that underwrites de Man's
project. Benjamin's own melancholic nostalgia always remained linked
to a critical method that found in the modern artwork's form a
constellation of historical dilemmas, profane illuminations, and silenced
voices. A new formalism must not convert that which it studies into
objects of or for consumption, just as itmust not enjoy what Benjamin
once referred to as the "negativistic quiet" of a left-wing melancholy that
converts the revolutionary political struggle itself into a reified object of
Hence, I'm not for a historicism that
pleasure.48 calling practices
essentialism," but rather for a politically and historically
"strategic
inflected formalism that deconstruction," a formal
practices "strategic
ism of its own status as an of reified consciousness or,
cognizant allegory
in other words, a formalism of its own truth-claims
capable doubting
without giving up on the object's Warheit-Gehalt (truth-content) whole
sale.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
NOTES
1 W. J. T. Mitchell, "The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy after All These Years,"
PMLA 118 (March 2003): 323.
2 Mitchell
argues quite correctly that formalism was never really gone and that this so
called "new" formalism is something "we will have already been committed to without
knowing it" ("Commitment," 324). On a vaguely similar but certainly more problematic
note, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Bang Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999) works to rehabilitate aestheticism with all of its attendant ethical imperatives and
Keatsian supplements.
3 Ellen Rooney, "Form and Contentment," Modern Language Quarterly 61 (March 2000):
17.

4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press,
1951), 27.
5 Mitchell, "Commitment," 324.
6 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968),
242.
7 Paul de Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrez
Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1996), 51.
Press,
8 use of the terms "transcendental" and "immanent" derives from Theodor W.
My
Adorno's "Cultural Criticism and
Society," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Webber and Shierry
Webber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).
9 Adorno, "Cultural Criticism," 33.
10 Kant, Critique ofJudgment, 15.
11 De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 81.
12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1996), 17.
13 De Man, "Form and Intent in American New Criticism," in Blindness and Insight: Essays
in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 32.
14 De Man, to Toward an Aesthetic
introduction of Reception, by Hans Robert Jauss
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xix.
15 De Man, "'Conclusions': Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of
the Translator,'" in The
Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
De Man's of Benjamin a
73-105. reading follows path established by Hannah Arendt.
Thanks in no small part to Arendt's introduction to the 1968 translation of Illuminations,
the English-speaking world has read Benjamin's invectives against the false totalities of
Fascist Europe as coextensive with Heideggerian and poststructuralist criticism. Arendt
claims that Benjamin had "more in common with Heidegger's remarkable sense for living
and bones . . . than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends"
eyes living
(46). As a result, her readings of Benjamin, like de Man's, fail to see the negative theory of
redemption immanent to, and the often problematic "dialectical subtleties" that serve as
the structure of, Benjamin's work. Hopefully, the translation of Benjamin's Selected
Writings, edited by Michael W.Jennings, will help clarify Benjamin's interlocking formal,
theoretical, and political concerns for the English-speaking academy.
16 Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock
and Michael W.Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 253.
17 De Man, "'Conclusions,'" 102.
18 In "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," de Man refers to Roland Barthes's
inflected structuralism as "salvational"
{Blindness and Insight, 241).
ideologically
19 De Man, "Dead-End," 240. De Man reads New Criticism as an "irrefutable
critique by
anticipation" of Barthes's "salvational" and political criticism.
20 De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight, 189.
21 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 1998), 175.
22 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), J 55, 13/328.
23 Max Pensky's Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play ofMourning (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) a full account of Benjamin's
provides refiguring
of allegory as a form of
mourning.
24 Throughout Benjamin's writings the term "experience" takes on an elusive and
complex character that mirrors its long and troubled philosophical history. In the second

of his much-discussed Baudelaire essays, Benjamin redefines the two philosophical

formulations of Erlebnis, or lived experience, consists of immediate and
experience:
inner experience, and Erfahrung, a more cumulative form of experience,
unintegrated
seems both collective and, at least in some sense, narratable. As much as he was attracted
to the cabalistic and "storytelling" implications of Erfahrung, Benjamin clearly displays
throughout "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (Illuminations, 155-200) that he very much
doubts the possibility of establishing collective existence and reflective experience
(Erfahrung) in modern capitalist culture.
he claims,It seems,
that in the modern world we
are constantly off shock. Thus, enter less often into "experience
fending impressions
(Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of one's life (Erlebnis)";
"perhaps," he goes on to suggest, "the special achievement of the shock defense may be
seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise in time in consciousness at
point
the cost of the integrity of its contents" (163). For Benjamin, of course, Erlebnis smacks of
the familiar economy of homogenous empty-time. In materialist terms, it seems to present
a form of alienation from history itself and a reification of the ontology of linear,
progressive time.
25 Benjamin, Origin, 166.
26 De Man, Allegories, 206.
27 De Man, "Pascal's Allegory," 69.
28 In particular see Andrew Benjamin, Present Hope: Architecture, fudaism (New
Philosophy,
York: Routledge, 1997), 81.
29 Theodor Adorno, Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,
Negative
1973), 183.
30 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus, 1998),
149.
31 See Susan Buck-Morss's The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977) and Beatrice
Hanssen's Walter
Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Benjamin's idea of
natural history is culled in large part from Georg Luk?cs's assertions about "second
nature" in The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic
Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
34 Benjamin, Origin, 177-78. Translation altered.
36 In "The Eyes of the Skull: Walter Benjamin's Aesthetics," Ranier Nagele explains this
element of Benjamin's thinking succinctly by comparing it to the poetic concept of
Vorwurf. Vorwurf is a technical term for the theme of an artwork. With the prefix Vor it
a fore-structure like the English or
indicates prefixes "pro" "pre." As Nagele explains,
Vorwurf "is pre-jection, something thrown before" (217). In Benjamin, the artist or, more
the allegorist/brooder does not create but rather finds the hieroglyphic
importantly,
this entity does not some
entity that is the discrete object. Of course, disclose ontological
revelation or ur-historical truth, rather it indicates the loss of its own history. Allegories
loss of the object's sense
represent the irrecoverable originary ("Eyes," in The Aesthetics of
Theorists: Studies on Benjamin Adorno, Marcuse,
the Critical and Habermas, ed. Ronald Roblin
[Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990], 206-43).
37 Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, 257.
38 Benjamin, The Correspondences ofWalter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor
W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 224.

39 See Jonathan Arac, "Afterword: Lyric Poetry and the Bounds of New Criticism," in
Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 351.
40 Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the of Man," in Selected Writings, 1:73.
Language
In '"Conclusions,"' his Cornell lecture on Benjamin, de Man seems particularly interested
in Benjamin's use of the term reine Sprache, which gets translated by de Man as "Pure
(91). De Man is quite explicit in claiming that for Benjamin reine Sprache points
Language"
not to the sacred or divine but rather to "a devoid of any kind of meaning,
language
language which would be pure signifier" (97).
42 As Buck-Morss points out in The Origin ofNegative Dialectics, Benjamin's Natur-Geschichte
dialectic towards Adorno 's own figuring of nature and history as
points mutually
determining, mutually demythologizing concepts (54).
44 I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 167.
47 See Rolf Tiedemann, "Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpreta
tion of the Theses 'On the Concept of History,'" in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History,
ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 175-209.
48 Benjamin, "Left-Wing Melancholy," in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W.Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 425.


Allegory by Paul de Man

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Allegory by Paul de Man

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Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and De Man on the Function of Allegory

Author(s): Jim Hansen

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The very opposition between knowledge which

penetrates from without and that which bores

Formalism is evidently making a comeback in North American

fervently disavowed."2 Similarly, in a special issue of Modern Language

New Literary History, 2005, 35: 663-683

This content downloaded from 130.88.0.232 on Tue, 8 Apr 2014 12:48:51 PM

readings score political points. We are reminded that if a respected and

likely to see formalisms indebted to postmodern modalities of suspicion

politics need not necessarily be aligned with conservative forces. In fact,

philosophical, social, and aesthetic paradoxes. In the writings of Walter

This content downloaded from 130.88.0.232 on Tue, 8 Apr 2014 12:48:51 PM

contemporary type of formalism is always already itself an allegory of

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II. The Dialectical Problem of Formalism

oversimplifying, then, we might say that the critical alternatives are

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historical, cultural, and social contradictions. The artwork

tively. In either case, and indeed in nearly any formalist critique,

by meditating on a particular object for which "the universal has

III. Formalism and the Question of Historicity

At first glance, de Man's methodology, predicated on poststructuralist

practice than the often theologically inflected approach taken by

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but itmarks a key difference between a poststructuralist to the

Benjamin's thinking seems to partake of the kind of immanent criti

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Benjamin's thought outlines how the inconsistencies of figures of

IV.An Allegorical Formalism

For both thinkers negation is the task of modern critical conscious

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contradictions and/or ontological problems. As the key figure for tragic

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explains that allegory embodies the paradoxical structure of a profane

object can become an emblem of absolutely anything else. In the

Allegory subsists as the mournful trope that embodies as it acknowledges

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a fixed point outside of the contingencies of history and

problem in de Man's work because it brings explicitly value-laden claims

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In Benjamin and de Man on allegory, then, we have two basic

the artwork's immanence seems to external

skeptical formalism relies on certain ontological assumptions, what

V. Natural History or Discursive Historicity

As a number of critics have indicated over the years, by championing

standing) ,works to disrupt the normal and accepted order of idealist

simply and undialectically as the "objects of consciousness." For Marx,

sponds to Marx's insights here. Throughout the Trauerspiel book,

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Benjamin develops a theory of the Natur-Geschichte (natural history)

[T]he word stands written on the countenance of nature in the

tory resembles something like a series of ruins, rather than a progressive

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subject to decay. Benjamin extrapolates from allegorical form a theory

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not to "the but, rather, to a In a dialectical

actually transforms into a sophisticated, form of

De Man's method of allegorical reading, on the other hand, seeks to

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and decadent. If we the Natur-Geschichte dialectic,

VI. Nostalgia and Lost Forms