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7/30/2019 06_GSR35-2MirabileAllegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man
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German Studies Review 35.2 (2012): 319333 2012 by The German Studies Association.
A BS TRA C T
Allegory, Pathos, and Irony:
The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man
Andrea Mirabile
-
ter Benjamin. Nevertheless, Benjamin is conventionally perceived as semireligious
and pathos-laden, whereas de Man is described as secular and emotionless. A close
The
Origin of German Tragic Drama and de Mans Blindness and Insight) complicate
this distinction, and the stereotypes supporting it. Both de Man and Benjamin
help us to question the accepted borders between the emotively charged and the
In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a
symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it.
Walter Benjamin1
I intend to take the divine out of reading.
Paul de Man2
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320 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
-
3
binary oppositions: secular vs. nonsecular, apathetic vs. pathetic, neutral vs. radical,
technical vs. poetic, and many others.4
5
Although Benjamin wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1924 and 1925,
6
7
responses to this rediscovery. Surprisingly, given his slightly atypical yet authoritative
8
Blindness and Insight (1971 and 1983) andAllegories of Reading (1979).9 In these
two collections, Benjamin is quoted very rarely and almost incidentally: twice in the
-
in rhetoric and language, who gradually but relentlessly rejects the pathetic nuances
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Andrea Mirabile 321
by Benjamins critical model.10
-
volume The Resistance to Theory, the author writes:
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lyptic tones, you have the particular eloquence that comes with that (because one
nihilistic rigor with sacred revelation.11
literary success:
12
Mallarm, Yeats,
and the Post-Romantic Predicament
distinction between the natural image and the emblem.13
-
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322 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
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ent. Both de Man and Benjamin stress instead the connection between allegory and
meaning and their conventional relationship. Benjamin writes about German baroque
Trauerspiel,
romantic allegory, stressing their common opposition to classicism:
to hieroglyphics. . . . The written word tends toward the visual. It is not possible
Both Benjamin and de Man discuss allegory as a rhetorical trope and an interpre-
tative strategy.14
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reveal other connections. On several occasions Benjamin analyzes symbol and allegory
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Andrea Mirabile 323
and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand . . . remains persistently the
facies hippocratica
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15
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324 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
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renouncing
the nostalgiaand the desire
16
whereas in de Man it does not carry the same melancholic nuance. Both Benjamin
in the relationship between allegorical signs and meanings; the allegorical temporal
-
and demons, ruins and death,memento mori -
Theatre of Death,
or Funeral Orations
transience of things, and the concern
eternity,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama:
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Andrea Mirabile 325
Trauerspiel
(167). Some pages later he negates this relationship, connecting medieval allegory
secular explanationPassion
(232), by a subsequent positive-redemptive movement. That is why, concluding his
17
Italian commedia dellarte
redemptive movement. This critical strategy, which one might consider also a resis-
-
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326 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
separating the
According to de Man, allegory and irony show the same separation between sign
-
justesse. .
is what we call allegory.18
Mans secularism decidedly rejects this option, as the author declares in a revealing
interview with Robert Moynihan:
things he then still wrote which have to do with reading dont compare with what
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Andrea Mirabile 327
compatible with reading.19
as serene and ironic, but condemned to temporal imprisonment and death. Never-
theless, it is maybe in this connection between allegory and irony that de Man both
TheOrigin of German Tragic
Drama,
20
-
Irony is unrelievedvertige,
-
vertige,-
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328 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
style (208).
21
-
-
he uses a poetical, emotional, and highly
22 and Mileur
23
Various commentators have seen Benjamins allegory as mystical, nostalgic, and
pathetic but redemptive, and de Mans allegory as secular, apathetic, and neutral but
24
Sein zum Tode . . . by demon-
25
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Andrea Mirabile 329
26
a critical aporia: Benjamins allegory is suspended between secular and religious
vocabularies, while de Mans is suspended between a linguistic, apathetic vocabulary
27 That is why the same scholars that write about a secular de Man
notice also, though incidentally, the numerous similarities between Benjamins and
28
29
-
TheOrigin of German Tragic Drama, he connects
in Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,now collected in
allegorical interpretation to historical, political, and sociological interpretation.30 In
-
-
cal system, in an endless chain. Thus literary critics perpetually oscillate between two
critical stages: blindness,
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330 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
insight, that is, the involuntary and
blindness as other less bright critics. InAllegories of Reading, he argues that
-
AuerbachsMimesisUrsprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.31
-
that appear particularly relevant within the current cultural horizon, including the
32
33
Notes The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
1998), 176.
The Yale
Review (1984): 586.
3. Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 159235; Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
4. In Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany
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Andrea Mirabile 331
Responses: On Paul de Mans Wartime
Journalism,
Reading de ManReading,
William Empson: The
Critical Achievement
Press, 1993), 21342. Rei Teradas Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
State of Exception, trans.
Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-
Secular World
-
Zeitschrift fr Deutsche Philologie
The History of Continental Philosophy. Volume 5. Critical
Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences,
-
Schriften, in the
Illuminations.
invaluable suggestions he gave me while I was completing this article.
The Resistance to Theory
Alfabeta
Critical Inquiry 14, no.
3 (1988): 590652.
9. Paul de Man,Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis,
107, 115.
Resistance to Theory,
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332 German Studies Review 35 /2 s 2012
a sense, incomplete.
Resistance to Theory, 106.
Orbis Litterarum
Critical Writings,
19531978
The Rhetoric of Roman-
ticism
Deconstruction and Criticism
Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 1: 15165 (Rome: Istituto
between symbol and allegory is modern: in antiquity the distinction was not clear, and in the
Middle Ages the terms were synonymous.
New Literary History 7, no. 2
(1976): 263.
Allegories of Reading
Strumenti critici 110 (2006): 14557.
Aesthetic Ideology, 69.
Lurid Figures,Aesthetic Ideology,18283.
Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik
-
The Rhetoric of Temporality,
Aesthetic Ideology,
irony,eine permanente Parekbase
thus the disruptive, aporetic element that suspends any synthetic teleology within allegory.
Reading de Man Reading,
The Rhetoric of Temporality Comparative
Literature 38, no. 4 (1986): 332.
Germanic Review 77, no. 2 (2002): 150.
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Andrea Mirabile 333
-
Reading de Man, 200. On the connections between Benjamin, de Man, and
Critical Writings,
19531978
A Study of Allegory in its Historical Context and Relationship to Contemporary
Theory
27. Rodolphe Gasch, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man
Press, 1998), 282.
Germanic
Review
connection between Bataille and Benjamin).
Lurid Figures, 91.
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