Allegories of Rending

Killing Time with Walter Benjamin

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4271027
AutoresRobert S Lehman (autor correspondente)
Ano2008
Volume39
Fascículo2
Páginas233-250
Data de publicação2008-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.0.0021
OpenAlexW1984415757
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas7

Nearly every critic of Benjaminian allegory has begun with the assumption that allegory is a fundamentally temporal form. Two possible readings thus present themselves: on the one hand, a finitist reading in which allegory insists on the implacable decay of all life against the organicism of the symbol; on the other, an infinitist reading in which allegory becomes the privileged figure for history's dialectical unfolding. Though each position has resulted in a number of powerful interpretations, neither has addressed the most radical feature of Benjaminian allegory: its challenge to time as the latter manifests itself by ordering human history. Benjamin develops his allegorical challenge to time in The Origin of German Tragic Drama , his studies of Baudelaire and, most profoundly, the ninth thesis "On the Concept of History." In the last of these texts, Benjamin's allegorical presentation of the "new angel" depicts a vision of history without time, a vision in which events occur absent any temporal continuity. In this vision, I argue, the critical force of what Benjamin calls the "allegorical intention" emerges

Art · Art history · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation