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Formalism and its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the

Function of Allegory

Hansen, Jim.

New Literary History, Volume 35, Number 4, Autumn 2004, pp. 663-683

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2005.0004

For additional information about this article

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New Literary History, 2005, 35: 663683

Formalism and Its Malcontents:Benjamin and de Man on the

Function of Allegory*

Jim Hansen

The very opposition between knowledge which

penetrates from without and that which boresfrom within becomes suspect to the dialecticalmethod, which sees in it a symptom of preciselythat reification which the dialectic is obliged toaccuse.

Theodor Adorno, CulturalCriticism and Society

Formalism is evidently making a comeback in North American

literary criticism. After facing decades of apparent exile at thesuccessive hands of the structuralists of the late 1960s, the

poststructuralists of the 1970s and 1980s, and the various historicistschools of the 1990s, the formalist analysis of aesthetic tropes appears tohave returned to the post-2000 academic scene. In a recent issue ofPMLA, W. J. T. Mitchell interrogates the terms longstanding use as apejorative while simultaneously affirming his own commitment toform.1 Mitchell warns us that this new formalism, a far more subtle,sober, and erudite approach than its much-derided ancestor the New

Criticism, shares many of the aims of historicism and ideology-critique.Moreover, Mitchell argues, throughout the critical debates of the lastfew decades, formalism has continued to rear its head, even when mostfervently disavowed.2 Similarly, in a special issue of Modern LanguageQuarterly, Ellen Rooney claims that formalism is an unavoidable mo-ment in the projects of both literary and cultural studies.3 LikeMitchell, many of new formalisms 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, Rene R. Trilling, Fergus Clinker,and the students from my graduate seminar on Frankfurt School Aesthetics from thespring of 2004.

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new literary history664

readings score political points. We are reminded that if a respected andnuanced critic like Jameson imports formalism into his Marxism, thenformalism must not be all that bad. To my way of thinking, this kind of

defensive reading of formalist techniques fails to think through thedivision between formalism and historicism. That is, perhaps an imma-nent critique of formalism, a critique that takes up and actually deploysformalisms logic, should begin by asking what is wrong with formalism,

where does its own internal logic collapse, and what separates ideologi-cally inflected historicism from a critique circumscribed by questions ofaesthetic form in the first place? Obviously, these are not so much newquestions as they are rewarmed versions of the familiar aporia that haskept philosophy professors up at night at least since G. W. F. Hegels

content- and history-driven Aestheticschallenged Immanuel Kants pro-nouncement that art was autotelic or purposiveness without purpose.4 Formodernity, in other words, formalism has always been a matter of theory.

This is all to say that if, as Mitchell suggests, academic criticism isentering the age of a new kind of formalism, I certainly do not thinkthat anyone suspects it will resemble either the traditionalist science ofmeaning one sees in the New Criticism or even the more sophisticatedliterary-historical/evolutionary model proposed by Russian formalism.5

Neither is it likely that any sort of contemporary and critically astute

academic formalism will try to teach us to recognize the inherentaesthetic beauty of certain forms. Quite the contrary, we are far morelikely to see formalisms indebted to postmodern modalities of suspicionand to the heteromorphic conceptions of historicism and discourseanalysis that this suspicion has engendered over the last thirty years.Generally speaking, formalism has been taken by a generation ofpolitically informed and historicist critics to be the other of ideologicalcriticism. If, however, immanent critique always conceals a politics, thatpolitics need not necessarily be aligned with conservative forces.In fact,claiming that all formalisms are reactionary would be an insight of suchpurely metaphysical formalism that even the most vulgar left-Hegeliancould denounce it as insufficiently historicized. Nevertheless, contempo-rary critics might well fear that even supple and reflective formalistpractices lead, at best, to something like a diffident quietism.

Rather than constructing a list of political critics who recur toformalism, I would like to look to two critics who often begin withformalism only to end up as its malcontents, articulating its variousphilosophical, social, and aesthetic paradoxes. In the writings of WalterBenjamin and Paul de Man, we see two thinkers who both attempted toredeem that clumsiest and most belabored of formal devices: allegory,the embodying of an idea in a character or an emblem. Formalistpractices were as central to Benjamins project as they were to de Mans.

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665formalism and its malcontents

For his part, Benjamin seemed so committed to teasing out the aestheticand dialectical implications of allegory that it remained central to hiscritical vocabulary even after his epistemo-theological thinking had

been called into question by his conversion to Marxism. On the otherhand, the de Manian conception of allegory remains suspicious both ofthe 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 particularlyrelentless strain of deconstruction. In his writing, allegory marks out thespace of the failure of referential meaning, the space in which, as heexplains, representation does not stand in the service of something thatcan be represented.7 In other words, early speculation about a ham-

handed formal feature provided something of a foundation for the kindof provocative micrological and materialist work that we see Benjamindoing throughout his later writings, particularly in Das Passagen-Werk(The Arcades Project) and the work on Charles Baudelaire. Likewise, indiscussing that same formal feature in his notorious 1969 essay TheRhetoric of Temporality, de Man initiates the kind of ascetic, negativereading that would come to characterize both his conception of thefinitude of human agency and his inveterate resistance to referentialand empirical meaning. In the work of Benjamin and de Man on

allegory, then, we witness two contrasting species of theoretically nu-anced literary criticism that not only deploy formalist strategies, but alsoactually begin and end with the consideration of aesthetic form, with

what we might call the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, theinternal and the external.8 When read against each other, Benjaminsmessianic approach to allegory and de Mans conception of allegoricalreading provide contrasting models of the political and/or theoreticalinterventions that a criticism reliant on the formal, the tropological, orthe carefully measured generic category can make. I believe that in their

separate techniques for engaging with or displacing the dialectic ofimmanence and transcendence, Benjamin and de Man suggest that anycontemporary type of formalism is always already itself an allegory oflarger philosophical or social problems. In fact, I will argue that anyformalism seeking to enter into or resituate current academic debatesmust start by negotiating the dialectic of immanence and transcendenceand by acknowledging how formalism itself invariably becomes a way ofthinking beyond form. In the end, we should be able to formulate thetheoretical boundaries for any new formalism by suggesting that aBenjaminian kind of politicizing formalism can be used to criticize a deManian nihilistic formalism while de Manian skepticism can, likewise, bedeployed to nuance the potentially reifying nostalgia that appears tohaunt Benjamins approach.

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II. The Dialectical Problem of Formalism

Simply put, formalisms, both old and new, approach the artworks

immanent or internal architecture. As this often-told story goes, tran-scendent criticism, always already extratextual in its aspirations, neglectsparticularity in an effort to focus on utopian, ethical, communal, orsocial generalities. Immanent criticism avoids such teleological agenda-setting by simply explicating the text and surveying its often verynuanced structuring principles. Of course, from a Marxist, feminist, orpostcolonial perspective, immanent criticism stands accused of neglect-ing the ideological and the historical entirely and of deploying its critical

vocabulary with some pretense to scientific authority. At the risk of

oversimplifying, then, we might say that the critical alternatives areeither confronting the internal structure of an art object by analyzing itsstylistic maneuvers, its coherence or incoherence, and its rhetoricalfigures, or else maintaining an external or identity position from whichto read a cultures products and call the whole of that culture intoquestion with regard to its ideology. With immanent criticism we get thefetishizing of the object itself and, implicitly, the notion of an abstract,ahistorical meaning that is always readily available to an interpretingsubject who always appears suspiciously impervious to anything resem-

bling prejudice or false consciousness. With transcendent criticism weoften get an extorted form of reconciliation in which objects aresubsumed under universal-historical principles, as transcendent critiquepursues its overt goal of positive social change. In its most nuancedformulations, however, immanent critique negates the universal-histori-cal through an analysis of the particular objects inconsistencies andambiguities.

The opposition between the immanent and the transcendent socentral to what we call literary criticism is, to Theodor Adornos way ofthinking, symptomatic of reified consciousness in that it fails to see howform is always already imbricated with the sociohistorical. Adorno tellsus in Prismsthat any truly dialectical criticism must subscribe to bothmethods and to neither.9 Each side of the dialectic remains enfoldedinextricably into its other. If we take it for granted that Adorno iscorrect, as someone like Mitchell certainly does, we still have todetermine precisely how particular breeds of formalism attempt torethink or even to sublimate this dialectic and to what ends. Of course,for Adorno political or utopian aesthetic criticism is not abandoned but,rather, kept alive by being thought negatively. That is, the transcendentand the immanent at once meet and are kept at bay by a critical methodthat points to the internal contradictions of a work of art-qua-object as

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embodying historical, cultural, and social contradictions. The artworkfalls 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,determining what transcendent aims the critic actually advocates can beachieved by establishing how the critic figures the finite boundary ofimmanent form as a reflection of the sociohistorical or philosophicalfinitude of human understanding and practice tout court. Explicitly,formalism always points towards boundaries, towards that which cannotbe discussed, always draws a line past which critical consciousnesstrespasses only at the risk of projecting a potentially mythic or totalitar-

ian order on an already existing world. Implicitly, formalism concealscertain assumptions about that preexisting order and its role in creatingthe possibility for human action and critical theory in the first place.Even when Kant, modernitys arch-formalist, describes the immanentconcerns of a reflective judgment, he claims that in such judgments onebegins by meditating on a particular object for which the universal hasto be found.10 In other words, even a most circumspect and rigorouslyskeptical formalism relies on or moves towards certain ontologicalassumptions. It seems to me, then, that any truly dialectical evaluation of

the different breeds of formalism must read each approachs explicit claimsagainst its implicit assumptions. We must ask what transcendent aims areimplicit in any given immanent critique. Coincidently, near the very endof his career, de Man engaged with Benjamins work on this very subject.

III. Formalism and the Question of Historicity

At first glance, de Mans methodology, predicated on poststructuralist

discourse analysis, the cautious teasing out of philosophic and linguisticparadoxes, and the foregrounding of something like undecidability,appears much more amenable to our own literary and theoreticalpractice than the often theologically inflected approach taken bysomeone like Benjamin. As late as the 1979 Allegories of Reading, de Manhad casually dismissed Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel(Origin of the German Mourning Play) for remaining too Hegelian in itsdialectics and too teleological in its attempt to define allegory and mapthe terrain of romanticism.11 In other words, Benjamins critique, blindto its own situatedness and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), remains tootranscendental, too willing to remain outside of history and attack the

whole of romantic consciousness because of its fragments and divisions.De Mans offhanded criticism of Benjamin might easily be overlooked,

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but it marks a key difference between a poststructuralist approach to thequestion of form and one inflected by Frankfurt School aesthetics.Following various Heideggerian schools of thought, de Man fore-

grounds the philosophical concept of historicity. If historicity, conceivedof as the unavoidable situatedness of the interpreting subject in acontext or discourse, circumscribes what Heideggerian thinkers call thehorizons of understanding, ifGeschichtlichkeitis, as Heidegger claims inBeing and Time, prior to what is called history, then it forecloses on thepossibility of transhistorical or universal-historical modes of sense-making.12 Ostensibly, then, there can be no such thing as a transcendentor teleological conception of History, no ontological principle likefreedom, revolution, theodicy, or identity to guide the dynamic of

History. Following this logic, as de Man explains in Form and Intentin American New Criticism, to understand something is to realize thatone had always known it, but at the same time, to face the mystery of thishidden knowledge. Understanding can be called complete only when itbecomes aware of its own temporal predicament.13 In poststructuralistthinking, the interpreter, subject to and constructed by the vicissitudesof structural and linguistic phenomena like diffrance, finds him/herselfbounded by the hermeneutic circle circumscribed by historicity. Fromthis perspective, Benjamins approach to the problem of form, which

foregrounds ideas like originality, revelation, and truth-content,seems to retain precisely those extrinsic, Hegelian-Marxist dialecticalmaneuvers that de Man sees as potentially totalizing.

Oddly enough, however, in his 1982 introduction to Hans RobertJausss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, de Man seems to have changed histune as he associates the Trauerspielbooks notion of allegory with thedisruptive force of figural language. Now, Benjamin gets groupedtogether with deconstructions favorite arch-debunker of metaphysicaland 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 tosay of Benjamins 1923 essay The Task of the Translator that in theprofession you are nobody unless you have said something about thistext (73).15 As with his various interpretations of Nietzsche, de Manbegan to read Benjamin as a protodeconstructor, a flouter of transcen-dent and utopian criticism. De Man is characteristically attentive to thedelicate aporias of Benjamins essay, and language certainly appears tohave as resolutely an antisubjectivist feel in Benjamins Translator essayas it has in much of de Mans post-1968 work. After all, Benjamin beginshis piece by telling us, no poem is intended for the reader, and thatlanguage does not communicate or impart any information.16 Here,Benjamins thinking seems to partake of the kind of immanent criti-cismconscious of its own situatednessthat de Man fosters, a criticism

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that does not work to resolve inconsistency through the fiat of someutopian, teleological, or extrinsic harmony. Rather, in de Mans reading,Benjamins thought outlines how the inconsistencies of figures of

speech and referentiality reflect the internal structures of language.Does this mean that, contra de Mans own claim in Allegories of Reading,Benjamins Trauerspielbook is not blind to its own Geschichtlichkeit?

Appended to de Mans lecture is a particularly illuminating question-and-answer session. Apparently disconcerted by de Mans arguments,Dominick La Capra explains to de Man that on the left today, I thinkBenjamin is being introduced as someone who gives us all of the . . . allof the subtlety of contemporary French criticism, with a politicaldimension thats very much identified with messianic hope.17 De Man

quickly retorts that Benjamins critical powers are resistant to messianism,that Benjamin would be closer to Nietzsche than he is to a messianictradition which he spent his whole life holding at bay (103). Beware allmessianic interpretations of Benjamin, he warns, for that way madnesslies (103). Of course, here all political readings seem to dovetail nicely

with the messianic ones. If de Man always preferred the immanent,negating approach to criticism over what he saw as the salvational andtranscendent pretensions of an overtly political criticism, then some-

where between 1979 and 1982 he seemed to discover a Benjamin who

agreed.18 But what if de Mans 1979 characterization of Benjaminsthought is, quite accidentally, as accurate as his 1982 depiction? PerhapsBenjamins rethinking of the dialectic of immanence and transcendenceprovides, to appropriate one of de Mans pet phrases, an irrefutablecritique by anticipation of the de Manian approach to the problem ofform.19 In de Man and in Benjamin, formalism becomes the way formodern thought to negotiate the problem of historicity, but Benjaminspeculiar, dialectical disposition towards aesthetic form maintains boththe transcendent and immanent positions at once, or, that is to say, it

enfolds the transcendent into the immanent while de Mans approachdeconstructs the transcendent via the immanent.

IV. An Allegorical Formalism

For both thinkers negation is the task of modern critical conscious-ness. Hence, both Benjamins Trauerspielbook and de Mans Rhetoricof Temporality speculate about literary meaning by staking a claim forthe negating immanence of allegory over and against the mythic anduniversalizing implications of its more popular sibling, the symbol. Ifformalism is to survive, it must itself become allegorical. That is,formalist reading must become an allegory for larger, sociohistorical

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contradictions and/or ontological problems. As the key figure for tragicpathos, the symbol transmutes that which has been lost within thecontext of an individual work of art into an eternal, indivisible, and

essential unity. Lost for an instant, it is recovered and recoverableforever. Symbols long for transcendence in the most overt and navesense. 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 expression of unity between the representative andsemantic functions of language, becomes a commonplace that underliesliterary taste, literary criticism, and literary history.20 Derived from themythic movement of tragedy, the symbol provides an idealizable teleol-ogy. As an artistic trope that also philosophizes, it works to overcome the

immanence-transcendence dialectic by reconciling material form totranscendental ideal. For Benjamin, the critical emphasis on symbolismand, subsequently, the teleological unity of form and content, erases thedistinction between the transcendental and the material, appearanceand essence, subject and object. In rather undialectical ways, symbolsactively conceal sociological, contextual, or referential conflict by con-structing universal imperatives and continuums. In Benjamins thought,and here he is followed closely by de Man, the romantic conception ofthe symbol posits the beautiful as the true and, likewise, as the truly

moral. Any formalism founded on and tied to this romantic theory ofthe symboland we might place New Criticism in this categorymaskssimilar transcendent aims. That which is symbolic, autotelic and unified-in-itself, also pretends to be absolute in a metaphysical sense. Thesimilarity here between the powers of the symbol and those claimed forthe post-Kantian Enlightened subject are not simply coincidental. Theyare both forms that get posited as preexisting the historical. In preexist-ing history, they also appear to define and guide it. Finally, then, thesymbol acts as a kind of a priori undialectical totality. In their critical

works, both de Man and Benjamin oppose the kind of overtlytranshistorical claims made by such a notion of the symbol. The symbolsubsists as a form that denies its historicity, where form can actually onlyexist in and reflect its own historicity. Formal attention to allegorybecomes a self-consciously micrological way of articulating the underly-ing macroproblems of modernity.

Lets not forget that allegory, regularly dismissed by romantic critics asfragmentary, anachronistic, and unpoetic, is something of a linguistictrick, an emblem or representation that refers to an unrepresentableidea. Artworks in which characters appear to simply and unproblematicallyembody virtue or lust always seem, at the very least, a bit forced. Theclumsy sphere of allegory is never as subtle, as timeless, or as beautiful asthe well-wrought world of the symbol. In his Trauerspielbook, Benjamin

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explains that allegory embodies the paradoxical structure of a profaneand bourgeois world because under allegorys auspices any person orobject can become an emblem of absolutely anything else. In the

language of allegory, then, as Benjamin further claims, we view a worldin 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 thecommodity makes of the experiences people have in this century.22

Where the symbol erases the distinction between matter (or form) andtranscendence, allegory foregrounds precisely this distinction becauseas a form it is so forced and excessive, so unashamedly about humanconsciousness struggling to dominate or to evade matter and nature. Inother words, allegorys failure actively underscores the gulf between

matter and transcendence by foregrounding the conflict between artis-tic form and transcendent or theological intention. Allegory pro-nounces a judgment upon the profane world by translating that worldserasure of the specific detail into a formal feature of art.

For Benjamin modern allegory does not idealize but, rather, mourns.23

Allegory subsists as the mournful trope that embodies as it acknowledgesthe loss of specificity, originality, and revelation. With this insight intothe structure of allegory in modernity, the Trauerspielbook anticipatesthe kind of aesthetic-historical thinking that Benjamin will later advo-

cate through his conception of experience. In his much-discussed essayOn Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin warns thatErfahrung(collec-tive, reflective, communal experience) has been replaced in modernityby the more solitaryErlebnis(lived experience).24 In the closing passageof the essay he suggests that in the collision of structurally profaneimagery and mundane materiality that we find in Baudelaires poetry, wesee the nature of something lived through (Erlebnis) to which Baudelairehas given the weight of experience (Erfahrung) (194). To Benjamins

way of thinking, Baudelaires poetry cannot recoverErfahrungfor us but,

rather, can offer us a critical simulacrum of its loss. This same negative-critical maneuver is central to Benjamins thinking about allegory.Baudelaire as allegorist broods upon and mourns a form of experiencethat is lost by depicting the failure, isolation, and horror of hiscontemporary world. Allegory becomes the formal feature par excel-lenceof the transient and the irretrievable. It points not to redemption,but only to the Fall itself, only to the dated and the worldly. Hence itsfunction as an object is critical and mortifying rather than harmonizingand reconciling. Benjamin encapsulates this distinction in the Trauerspielbook by claiming that whereas in the Symbol destruction is idealizedand the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light ofredemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facieshippocraticaof history as a petrified, primordial landscape.25 Where the

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symbol presents a fixed point outside of the contingencies of history andnature as eternal and unified, allegory presents the emblem as a deathmask, 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 haveexperienced a crisis of the aura, or, that is, eras that have stigmatizedthe ideas of both distance and the cult value of the work of art tendtoward 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 Mans work. As hetells us in his own Allegorybook, allegorical narratives tell the story ofthe failure to read.26 And certain kinds of very self-conscious authors,the Nietzsches, Rousseaus, and Prousts of the world, deploy the linguis-

tic trickery that is allegorical forma kind ofsubstitutio ad absurduminorder to undermine any simple, utilitarian, or transhistorical purposefor their various writings. For de Man, these writers acknowledge theirown historicity by allegorizing unreadability itself. They represent thecollapse of transcendental signifieds. Putting it another way, de Manargues, in The Rhetoric of Temporality, that the meaning constitutedby the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition . . . of aprevious sign with which it can never coincide, since it is the essence ofthe previous sign to be pure anteriority (207). The linguistic context or

constructedness of an allegory, its situatedness, always collapses thatallegorys pretension to be transcendentally or transhistorically true. Asa critic, the trick is to be aware of this aporia, to see allegory, as de Maninstructs us in Aesthetic Ideology, as the ironic pseudoknowledge of itsown impossibility.27 Where in Benjamin allegory reflected some histori-cal failure of or crisis in human perception en masse, in de Man itreflects a deconstructive move on the part of either a piece of writing oran individual writer. Allegory, then, is always presented as an ethicalproblem in de Mans work because it brings explicitly value-laden claims

about things like virtue or falsehood into conflict with their ownhistoricity. Writers sufficiently attuned to the nuances of languageshistoricity appear capable of realizing allegory not as truth but, rather, asan indication of the truths ineluctable failure to be anything other thanrhetorical and situated. Simply put, then, in opposition to the symbol,allegory consciously points to its own temporality and, in so doing,embarrasses its own claims to truth. De Mans rethinking of theimmanence-transcendence dialectic begins with the individuated prob-lems inherent in form and then leaps directly to larger structural andontological metaproblems. In the process the space that mediatesbetween these extremes, the space of collectivity, gets occluded by deManian criticism, which seems to suspect that collectivity is alwayssubject to a kind of intransigent and totalizing conformity.

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In Benjamin and de Man on allegory, then, we have two basicformulations of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence. ForBenjamin, the artworks immanence seems to embody external

sociohistorical problems, and for de Man, the internal incoherencesthat manifest themselves in form are indicative of the larger problemsassociated with historical situatedness. In both cases, formalist analysisuncovers failure. If, as I claimed earlier, even the most circumspect andskeptical formalism relies on certain ontological assumptions, whatdifferent kinds of ontological assumptions underwrite the formalisms wesee in Benjamin and de Man? Where are the respective boundaries offinitude drawn and to what purpose? In Benjamins Trauerspiel book,finitude is marked by the dialectic ofNatur-Geschichte(natural history).

In de Man, the finite is delineated by an ontological principle that wemight call discursive historicity.

V. Natural History or Discursive Historicity

As a number of critics have indicated over the years, by championingthe allegorical fragment over the mythic aspirations of the symbol,Benjamin takes aim at those pretensions of modern subjectivity that

grow out of idealisms claims to totality.28 To Benjamins way of thinking,the subject can neither precede nor provide a teleology for history. Histhinking prepares the way for what Adorno will come to call Vorrang desObjekts, the preponderance of the object.29 A criticism focusing on theobjects Geschichte(history), rather than the subjects Verstehen (under-standing), works to disrupt the normal and accepted order of idealistphilosophy and culture. In a sense, Benjamin knocks the modernsubject off of its philosophical and cultural pedestal. In The GermanIdeology, Marx argues that idealist philosophies generally seek to explain

away pesky things like materiality and empirical history.30 In fact, forMarx the tradition of philosophical idealism actually reads materialhistory as merely a result of ideal history. History gets replaced by thehistory of philosophy or the history of understanding, individualsare transformed into consciousness, and things like nature or thematerial world are either renounced as unreachable or understoodsimply and undialectically as the objects of consciousness. For Marx,this theoretical maneuver makes idealism a very heady, but finallypolitically vacuous, philosophy. Of course, to Marxian ways of thinking,if a philosophy replaces politics with abstraction it does so at the price ofshoring up the status quo and supporting reified social relations.Intuitively, even in its pre-Marxian phase, Benjamins thinking corre-sponds to Marxs insights here. Throughout the Trauerspiel book,

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Benjamin develops a theory of the Natur-Geschichte (natural history)dialectic that shares Marxs suspicions about abstract philosophy. 31 Thisdialectic 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 philosophys rejoinder to Marxs criticism.In contrast, a Benjaminian theory of form works neither to point out norto expand horizons of understanding but, rather, to indicate thathuman understanding is itself subject to a dialectic that can be neitherinstrumentalized nor fully understood. That is, human understandingand historicism must be read together as only one side of the mutuallydetermining 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.32The imprint of Natur-Geschichte separates allegory from the Telos anduniversalism of the symbol. The protestant baroque playwrights thatBenjamin studies in his Trauerspiel book view history as human andprofane. In their plays, nature, in all of its decay and transience,becomes an allegory for a human history that is resolutely tied to theruin, the irreparably lost, the morbid.33 This is how allegory points toNatur-Geschichte. It is an immanent problem of allegorical form, with allits fixed, outdated, mundane meanings, that points towards an external

or transcendent problem. As Benjamin goes on to explain:

[T]he word history stands written on the countenance of nature in thecharacters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the Natur-Geschichte-,

which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of a ruin.In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guisehistory does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that ofirresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegoriesare, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. 34

If nature was the primary source for the Trauerspielallegorists, and theyviewed nature as eternally decaying, then history, written upon nature,was always already decaying with it. Furthermore, if human history, likenature, is transient and impermanent, then it is neither self-realizingnor self-recovering but, rather, always fragmentary and disunited. His-tory resembles something like a series of ruins, rather than a progressiveGeist or consciousness, and is much more accurately mourned as acollection of lost and defeated cultures than celebrated as a triumphal

procession from the past into the future. As such, in allegory, materialform itself, which is always moribund, can never reconcile with transcen-dental ideal, can never be permanent. Rather, it is a marker ofimpermanence and loss.

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Where the symbol had pointed beyond history and towards ontologi-cal truths, allegorical form, so dated and lifeless, points towards theruins place in what Benjamin calls the Jetzt, the now of contemporary

actuality.35

The ruin exists as ruin in the present, and, as Benjaminfurther explains, ruins are the formal elements of works of art (182).The baroque allegorists pile these ruins and fragments, these allegori-cal stereotypes and remnants, on top of each other without any strictteleology or goal (178). Literature, in turn, does not embody theautotelic art of creation but rather, as Benjamin explains, an arsinveniendi, the art of finding fragments, and the accruing of more andmore fragments only serves to intensify the artworks sense of mourningand loss, its persistent yet miserable denunciation of totality (179).36 In

1940 Benjamin will reenvision this idea writ large in his final piece, theTheses on the Philosophy of History, where he depicts Paul KleesAngelus Novus observing with great horror a catastrophic history thatpiles wreckage upon wreckage.37 There, Benjamin goes on to warn thatthe tradition of the lost and the oppressed should teach us torecognize the dangers inherent in our contemporary now-moment or

Jetztzeit(257). The ruins of the past teach us to recognize and critiquethe present. Similarly, allegories from past works of art teach us that ourown ideas and circumstances are, like nature, invariably transitory and

subject to decay. Benjamin extrapolates from allegorical form a theoryof human finitude. Allegorys apparently arbitrary linking of anunrepresentable idea to a material emblem indicates that the idea itself

was dialectically enfolded into a material history strewn with similarlytransient ideas. History, we are to remember, is written on transientnature, and, subsequently, allegory represents the irrecoverable loss ofthe objects originary sense. Allegory historicizes itself, and immanentcritique, then, becomes an allegorical method for discussing andmeditating on lost forms. Formalism itself becomes allegorical.

From an attempt to differentiate Trauerspiel allegory from tragicsymbolism, Benjamin goes on to develop a theory of allegorical percep-tion that calls modernitys various notions of progress and historicisminto question. Part of allegorys critical function is to awaken us to thecurrent historical moment. The arc of Benjamins theory of forms isfinally sociocritical as opposed to epistemological. Discussion of the art-objects immanent architectural inconsistencies and failures leads out-

ward to observations about cultural and historical failures. As Benjaminhimself claims in his December 9, 1923, letter to Florens Christian Rang,the same forces that become explosively and extensively temporal inthe world of revelation (and this is what history is) appear concentratedin 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

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not point to the way but, rather, to a problem. In a dialecticalmaneuver that almost seems more like a Mbius strip, an immanentcritique actually transforms into a sophisticated, negative form of

transcendent criticism.De Mans method of allegorical reading, on the other hand, seeks to

cure North American formalism of its navet about the problem ofhistoricity. As de Man sees it in Form and Intent in American NewCriticism, the patient and nuanced attention that New Critics paid tothe reading of form succumbed to a kind of fetishism by mistaking theHeideggerian hermeneutic circle for the organic circularity of naturalprocesses (29). Their practice was, at least in an intuitive sense,auspicious for its negativity, its dual focus on ambivalence and paradox,

but the New Critics themselves remained uninformed about what deMan calls the epistemological nature of all interpretation (29). Theyfailed to see that aesthetic formalism leads inevitably to certain ontologi-cal questions about the possibility of transcendent knowledge. Theymistook forms, which negate truth, for the truth as such. De Manscriticism places Heideggerian notions of Geschichtlichkeit, along withmuch of the subsequent French poststructuralist theories of discursiveGeschichtlichkeit, adjacent to New Critical formalism. He formulates a self-aware new New Criticism, an immanent critique conscious of its

ontological implications and restrictions.39 As he claims in Allegories ofReading, his criticism acknowledges that language is rhetorical ratherthan representational (106). That is, de Manian allegorical readingbecomes so vigilant that it mistrusts itself. Through a notion of allegoryas failed reading, de Man finds a way to see the rhetorical, situated, orperformative functions of language as evidence of historicity, and thephilosophers and artists he esteems invariably allegorize this sameontological problem. Form points to the finitude of human sense-making and the falsity of teleological conceptions of history. The

Truth gets replaced by contextual and discursive truths of varioushermeneutic circles. Of course, claiming that all truth is contextual isalso making a truth-claim, but for de Man this is a truth-claim thatacknowledges its own finitude. It is, in other words, a negative truth-claim. Such claims, he believes, always already preempt the messianicand political ones that totalize on the one hand while ignoring historic-ity on the other. An intractable formalism, then, leads de Man to thinkthe 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,Benjamins approach acts at once to acknowledge and to critique thehermeneutic circle created by the problem of historicity. In other words,historicity-an-sich can never be an ontological principle for Benjamin

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because his thinking on allegory, which draws heavily from his 1916essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, argues thatnature is overnamed by human language, that in human language,

nature is continually made to fit different human needs, continuallyinstrumentalized.40 In poststructuralist thinkers as different as de Man,

Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and others, nothing precedes discourse,or, at the very least, anything that precedes discourse becomes subject tothe play of language as soon as we attempt to render it intelligible.Hence, nature is not something one can discuss in any real sense. Butfor Benjamin understanding and the like, those things through whichconsciousness situates itself and becomes situated in time, are only onehalf of a dialectical equation. Philosophical notions of historicity often

acknowledge this limit by concentrating on how consciousness, subjectto signifying systems, techniques, and practices, constructs and getsconstructed by a context, worldview, or form of life.

In On Language as Such, Benjamin argues that it is no longerconceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the wordhas an accidental relation to the object, and he goes on to claim thatlanguage never gives meresign (69). In Benjamins theory of language,nature serves as the necessary dialectical counterpoint to history andunderstanding. From this perspective, the poststructuralist notion of

discursive historicity reads like a move that embraces some of theinstrumental qualities of language or as a philosophical maneuver thatoccludes the natural through overnaming. From such a perspective,nature, like allegory, merely represents an object-world in which detail,origin, authenticity, and revelation are of no great importance. Allegorypoints to a profane world, but allegorical reading embraces that worldby limiting criticism to the discursive analysis of epistemological issues.

While on the poststructuralist hand we have the fear of the authorizingoriginal and of the transhistorical claim to truth upon which it draws, on

the other, tacitly modernist, hand, represented here by Benjamin, wehave 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 thatthe representative, the mythic, the iconic, or the fetishistic has come toreign over the actual. That is, as Marx would no doubt see it, aphilosophical theory of language takes unrestrained priority over, and inmany instances actively occludes, material reality. Nature itself becomesalways already second to signifying systems. Nature takes whatever namethat humans deem fit to give it and remains mute. But for Benjaminnatures silence mournfully annunciates a critique of human under-standing and of instrumental modes of reason. Careful allegorists reveala Nature that forces us to acknowledge that human history is transient,

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profane, and decadent. If we recognize the Natur-Geschichte dialectic,however, we recognize the loss of meaning rather than its ontologicalabsence, and we recognize it in and for theJetztzeit. This is an essentially

historical, as opposed to an epistemological, insight. To put it simply,Benjamins formalism has more in common with the projects ofhistoricism and ideology-critique than with that of New Criticism.

Dialectically speaking, then, for Benjamin the transcendent or endur-ing truth-content of an allegorical work of art is reached only through arecognition of that works own transient position as cultural ruin. Formdecays historically. Its truth is its loss, its historical decay. If the ruincontinues to exist after its meanings have been shed or lost, thosemeanings display themselves as historical, as subject to both transitory

nature and to politics and power. Rather than attempting to recoverwhat was eternal and beautiful about the work, the critic explores thework as ruin, as failed, transient form. Criticism must show preciselythat, and how, allegorical meanings have passed away. In the Trauerspielbook Benjamin calls this critical activity the mortification of the

works.41 The transcendent element of Benjamins dialectic pointstowards the finitude of a human history that is at once determined anddemythologized by its other, the natural. As an immanent form thatalways collapses in the face of transcendent time, allegorical form calls

consciousness, perception, and understanding into question. It arreststhought. But it is also important to recognize that nature is never a firstprinciple 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, andnature is acknowledged as a category subject to historical thought.Benjamins insight into the Natur-Geschichtedialectic initiates the Frank-furt School critique of dominance that is perhaps best represented by

Adorno and Max Horkheimers post-World War II philosophical mani-

festo,Dialectic of Enlightenment.42

VI. Nostalgia and Lost Forms

Earlier, I claimed that formalism is generally thought to be the otherof political or historical criticism. If, however, as I have argued, formal-ism simply conceals its politics, it does not necessarily follow that thosepolitics will be reactionary or conservative. In the present state of theacademy, it seems much more likely that different kinds of formalism

will become the bases of different theoretical and historical approachesto aesthetic and cultural politics. The key is to be able to discern whichontological or historical principles are supported by our contemporary

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brands of formalism. If such an undertaking requires that close readingalways be paired with some kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, then one

version of this suspicion is what de Man advocates in books like Aesthetic

Ideologyand The Resistance to Theory. In the latter, he warns that politicalcriticism often confuses the materiality of the signifier with the materi-ality of what it signifies.43 The linguistic tricks and false realitiesimagined in and by literary language, then, should teach us to seeideology itself as the ultimate fiction, as the confusion of linguistic withnatural reality (11). Ideology-critique is, in de Mans criticism, discred-ited by a formalist technique that unmasks all language as subject to thesame problems as literary language. Literature becomes a metonym fordiscursive historicity, and overtly historicist approaches to interpreting

literature are characterized as idealist and nave. One could easilyandto some degree justifiablyargue that the kind of paradox-drivenallegorical reading that de Man encourages makes nothing happen. Inhis Principles of Literary Criticism, that inveterate moralist I. A. Richardsclaimed long ago that attention to form averts misapprehensions andcertain kinds of interpretive biases.44 De Manian critique sees politics asideological mystification or, in other words, as the grandest of our

various misapprehensions and interpretive biases.45 But perhapspoststructuralist formalisms trenchant fear of the truth-claim has

been at once its most astute and most misdirected contribution tocritical theory. In some sense, the threat facing contemporary formalismis not that it will conceal reactionary politics in the guise of the truth-claim, but, rather, that it will become so immanent and so skeptical as todoubt the use or veracity of any kind of collectivity or political criticism,that it will see all political critique as structurally totalitarian. To returnto Marxs insights from The German Ideology, such a criticism falls prey tothe same kind of thinking that allowed philosophical idealism to replacepolitics with abstraction and, so, to shore up the status quo in the first

place. Finally, Benjamins criticism gives us a model of formalism thatfights instrumental reason without giving up on ideology-critique. Infact, a formalism based on such a theory of allegory would see thestruggle against instrumental reason as the most significant work of anycircumspect and dialectical criticism. This is why Benjamin warns us inthe Trauerspiel book that in the last analysis, structure and detail arealways historically charged. The object of philosophical criticism is toshow that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historicalcontent, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into aphilosophical truth.46 In this dialectic, form and history are mutuallydetermining and mutually demythologizing. Each always points beyonditself and towards the other. Moreover, each points towards loss and thetransience embodied by nature.

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Though, like de Mans, Benjamins notion of immanent critique hasthe shape of negative truth, Benjamins thought also invariably calls fora criticism that begins with the mortification of the work of art and ends

by mortifying the structure of the social world from which that worksprings. A subtle and reflective newformalism would be wise to do thesame. But Benjamins allegorical formalism also seems to engender akind of intransigent nostalgia for the lost. From a certain light Benjaminsthinking seems less like historical materialism and more like themelancholy political messianism that Rolf Tiedemann accuses it ofbeing.47 If a Benjaminian mortification of the work actually manifesteditself as a nostalgia that devolved into a comfortable, conformist plea-sure in the lost, a tragic jouissance that took no critical account of the

current state of affairs, that saw no analogue of the present moment ofdanger in the dead forms of the past, then that nostalgia should by allmeans be subjected to the kind of skepticism that underwrites de Mansproject. Benjamins own melancholic nostalgia always remained linkedto a critical method that found in the modern artworks form aconstellation of historical dilemmas, profane illuminations, and silenced

voices. A new formalism must not convert that which it studies intoobjects of or for consumption, just as it must not enjoy what Benjaminonce referred to as the negativistic quiet of a left-wing melancholy that

converts the revolutionary political struggle itself into a reified object ofpleasure.48 Hence, Im not calling for a historicism that practicesstrategic essentialism, but rather for a politically and historicallyinflected formalism that practices strategic deconstruction, a formal-ism cognizant of its own status as an allegory of reified consciousness or,in other words, a formalism capable of doubting its own truth-claims

without giving up on the objects 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,PMLA118 (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 withoutknowing it (Commitment, 324). On a vaguely similar but certainly more problematicnote, Elaine Scarrys On Beauty and Being Just(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1999) works to rehabilitate aestheticism with all of its attendant ethical imperatives andKeatsian supplements.3 Ellen Rooney, Form and Contentment, Modern Language Quarterly61 (March 2000):17.

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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, Pascals Allegory of Persuasion, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. AndrezWarminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 51.8 My use of the terms transcendental and immanent derives from Theodor W.Adornos Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Webber and ShierryWebber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).9 Adorno, Cultural Criticism, 33.10 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 15.11 De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural 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 ofNew York Press, 1996), 17.13 De Man, Form and Intent in American New Criticism, in Blindness and Insight: Essaysin the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1983), 32.14 De Man, introduction to Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, by Hans Robert Jauss(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xix.15 De Man, Conclusions: Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator, in TheResistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),73105. De Mans reading of Benjamin follows a path established by Hannah Arendt.

Thanks in no small part to Arendts introduction to the 1968 translation of Illuminations,the English-speaking world has read Benjamins invectives against the false totalities ofFascist Europe as coextensive with Heideggerian and poststructuralist criticism. Arendtclaims that Benjamin had more in common with Heideggers remarkable sense for livingeyes and living bones . . . than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends(46). As a result, her readings of Benjamin, like de Mans, fail to see the negative theory ofredemption immanent to, and the often problematic dialectical subtleties that serve asthe structure of, Benjamins work. Hopefully, the translation of Benjamins SelectedWritings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, will help clarify Benjamins 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 Barthessideologically inflected structuralism as salvational (Blindness and Insight, 241).19 De Man, Dead-End, 240. De Man reads New Criticism as an irrefutable critique byanticipation of Barthess salvational and political criticism.20 De Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality, in Blindness and Insight, 189.21 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama(NewYork: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 Penskys Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning(Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) provides a full account of Benjamins refiguringof allegory as a form of mourning.24 Throughout Benjamins writings the term experience takes on an elusive andcomplex character that mirrors its long and troubled philosophical history. In the second

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of his much-discussed Baudelaire essays, Benjamin redefines the two philosophicalformulations of experience: Erlebnis, or lived experience, consists of immediate andunintegrated inner experience, and Erfahrung, a more cumulative form of experience,seems both collective and, at least in some sense, narratable. As much as he was attracted

to the cabalistic and storytelling implications ofErfahrung, Benjamin clearly displaysthroughout On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (Illuminations, 155200)that he very muchdoubts the possibility of establishing collective existence and reflective experience(Erfahrung) in modern capitalist culture. It seems, he claims, that in the modern world weare constantly fending off shock. Thus, impressions enter less often into experience(Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of ones life (Erlebnis);perhaps, he goes on to suggest, the special achievement of the shock defense may beseen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness atthe cost of the integrity of its contents (163). For Benjamin, of course, Erlebnissmacks ofthe familiar economy of homogenous empty-time. In materialist terms, it seems to presenta 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, Pascals Allegory, 69.28 In particular see Andrew Benjamin, Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism(NewYork: Routledge, 1997), 81.29 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,1973), 183.30 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology(New York: Prometheus, 1998),149.

31 See Susan Buck-Morsss The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, WalterBenjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977) and BeatriceHanssens Walter Benjamins Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Benjamins idea ofnatural history is culled in large part from Georg Lukcss assertions about secondnature in The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great EpicLiterature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).32 Benjamin, Origin, 167.33 Benjamin, Origin, 179.34 Benjamin, Origin, 17778. Translation altered.35 Benjamin, Origin, 183.

36 In The Eyes of the Skull: Walter Benjamins Aesthetics, Ranier Nagele explains thiselement of Benjamins thinking succinctly by comparing it to the poetic concept ofVorwurf. Vorwurf is a technical term for the theme of an artwork. With the prefix Vor itindicates a fore-structure like the English prefixes pro or pre. As Nagele explains,Vorwurfis pre-jection, something thrown before (217). In Benjamin, the artist or, moreimportantly, the allegorist/brooder does not create but rather finds the hieroglyphicentity that is the discrete object. Of course, this entity does not disclose some ontologicalrevelation or ur-historical truth, rather it indicates the loss of its own history. Allegoriesrepresent the irrecoverable loss of the objects originary sense (Eyes, in The Aesthetics ofthe Critical Theorists: Studies on Benjamin Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, ed. Ronald Roblin

[Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990], 20643).37 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, 257.38 Benjamin, The Correspondences of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and TheodorW. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994), 224.

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39 See Jonathan Arac, Afterword: Lyric Poetry and the Bounds of New Criticism, inLyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1985), 351.40 Benjamin, On Language as Such and the Language of Man, in Selected Writings, 1:73.

In Conclusions, his Cornell lecture on Benjamin, de Man seems particularly interestedin Benjamins use of the term reine Sprache, which gets translated by de Man as PureLanguage (91). De Man is quite explicit in claiming that for Benjamin reine Sprachepointsnot to the sacred or divine but rather to a language devoid of any kind of meaning,language which would be pure signifier (97).41 Benjamin, Origin, 182.42 As Buck-Morss points out in The Origin of Negative Dialectics, Benjamins Natur-Geschichtedialectic points towards Adornos own figuring of nature and history as mutuallydetermining, mutually demythologizing concepts (54).43 De Man, Conclusions, 11.44 I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism(New York: Harcourt, 1950), 167.45 De Man, Conclusions, 11.46 Benjamin, Origin, 182.47 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), 175209.48 Benjamin, Left-Wing Melancholy, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 425.

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