Allegory and Ideology

1 Historical: The Ladder of Allegory

It does not seem wise to begin our presentation with the secret that allegory is itself allegorical: an interpretive virus that, spreading by way of its own propagations, proliferates and perpetuates itself until, in a kind of incurable interpretive frenzy, it becomes indistinguishable from the text and no longer visible to the naked eye. Yet allegory is also a surgical instrument and a diagnostic tool, by way of which the atomic particles of a sentence or a narrative, the most minute meanings and secondary connotations, are registered on the X-ray plate in all their guilty absence, in all their toxic participation. Freud showed us that our very dreams are allegories,¹ while the theologians of all the religions—great and small—read reality itself as an inescapable swarm of allegories with all the exegetical obsession of any garden-variety paranoiac. So we had better not begin by admitting that there is an allegory of allegory itself; that the allegorist, like the politician, is always corrupted by the power of his or her monopoly of interpretation; that allegory turns all books into a single central text; and finally that allegory goes hand in hand with secrecy, just as Umberto Eco showed that the whole point of language as such was not truth, but lying.²

It is always better, when confronted with so multifarious a term, to begin by identifying its various enemies, which is to say, its opposites. Maybe we can reduce them to two: the first condemns the multiplicity and dispersal of allegory with the unity of the living symbol. The second denounces everything cut-and-dried, abstract, desiccated in the allegorical narrative, with the concreteness of reality itself and the perceptual three-dimensionality of realism. (Erich Auerbach’s figura was an ingenious strategy for combining both these onslaughts.)³ Meanwhile, and characteristically, allegory turns against itself and indicts itself by way of a generic and pragmatic distinction between outright allegorical structures which have the objectivity of fixed forms and a multiple collection of seemingly random interpretations or readings now consigned to some general (and generally pejorative) category called allegoresis.

This final form of the dismissal of allegory as a dangerous contagion will be acknowledged in the last chapter of this book. The argument from realism, however, can be better undermined by history: for it presupposes a radical distance between meaning and empirical reality, and attributes to allegory a failed attempt to produce an impossible unification of these dimensions (which are ultimately those of thought and experience, or better still, of soul and body). But in an age that prizes difference and differentiation, heterogeneity, incommensurability, a resistance to unification, this failure cannot continue to be a reproach; and it is our fault then, as readers—perhaps as old-fashioned readers—that we fail to acknowledge the reality of the literal level of the allegorical text: this was not the error of the first allegorists, for whom that literal level was historical fact, to be respected in all its bloody triumphs and failures.

As for the symbol, however, it generated a historical debate in its own right in the Romantic period, on which it is perhaps useful to pause. Not that the Romantics themselves—whether German or English—were any too reliable in their promiscuous use of these seemingly contradictory terms. Nor was Wordsworth philosophically aware of the distinction between just that realism we have been evoking and the Nature of which his new style wished to be the symbol. But it was precisely that symbolism of nature and the natural which was itself profoundly allegorical. The bourgeois revolution—supreme event of the age and even, for Immanuel Kant, of History itself, the seizure by a people of its own destiny ⁴ (and, for the bourgeoisie, the setting of limits for itself in the form of a written constitution)—finds its literary expression in the denunciation of the allegorical decoration and rhetorical embellishments of the poetry of the ancien régime, with its call for that plain style of American revolutionary clothing (Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers). That symbolic fashion, however, turned out to be not merely an epochal change in taste, but also yet another allegory for class: for democratic equality, without the flourishes or the rhetoric.

So we have here a first example of how allegory itself can be allegorical, when it is symbolic of an ancien régime and its class hierarchies. Its much-touted opposite number in characteristically Romantic symbols—Novalis’s “blue flower,” the simple-mindedness of Wordsworth’s peasants, Schelling’s call for a new mythology—when interpreted either historically, or in terms of literary history, in fact unmask themselves as so many allegories. However, the symbol as such—even when disguised under Hegelian trappings as “the concrete universal”—always marks the attempt at a flight from interpretation, from theoretical and historical understanding. It has at least that much in common with religion; and the conjunction of both in the person of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is no accident (although one would want to add that this personage—like Walter Benjamin in a later period—is an immense continent whose exploration is always rewarding, and whose flora and fauna are often in rich, genetically productive conflict with one another).

Meanwhile, if the revulsion from allegory has its historical determinants and its often-political meaning, it is well to remember that its revivals do as well. For the West, at least, the first allegorical stirrings are to be found around the emergence of sacred texts, or at least—in the case of Homer—culturally central ones, each one of which will in the modern period come to be identified as the Book of the World. We will examine Homeric allegory in a moment; but far more dramatic is the flurry of allegorization that accompanies the Pentateuch or the Torah down through the ages, in Jewish and Christian commentary alike.

As it is the latter, and the evolution of its doctrine of the four meanings or levels of scripture, that constitutes the axis of this book, it will be worth recalling the dual function of allegorical interpretation in those initial centuries in which Christianity, following the strategic lead of St. Paul, prepares to become the universal religion of the archetypal Western world empire. On the one hand, a small Jewish sect needs to legitimize itself in the eyes of the non-Christian Jewish population by demonstrating the myriad and covert ways in which the Hebrew Bible announces the coming of Christ as its fulfillment—a word that plays a significant role in the allegorical theory elaborated in this process. Thus, to draw on a well-worn illustration, the historical (literal) fact of the descent of the Hebrews into Egypt and their subsequent liberation will stand as a figure for the death and the resurrection of Christ, an interpretation that by no means excludes other meanings and other kinds of allegorical interpretations of the same event.

Meanwhile, the new religion must also, at one and the same time, cleanse itself of any narrow ethnic or regional identifications and translate its foundational texts into messages that address the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the eastern Mediterranean. This is also achieved allegorically by sublimating and spiritualizing Jewish Law; to use its most famous problem as an example, the requirement for circumcision is transformed into a “circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11). The physical act of circumcision is thereby figurally transformed and translated into a spiritual “circumcision of the heart.”

Both of these aspects of allegorization—the typological one (proposing a fulfillment alongside its literal and prophetic enunciation) and the figural one (which seems to suggest a sublimation of the physical act into a ritual or in other words a symbolic and spiritual event)—can still be detected in the ideological function of modern allegory, where they can be identified as the revelation of a Utopian narrative of history on the one hand, and a construction of subjectivity on the other.

But at this point it will be desirable to return to origins in the elaboration of the ultimate fourfold system of allegorical meanings, considered as a ladder to be climbed rung by rung beginning with its simplest elements or forms.

The term allegory is most often applied to what may be called a one-to-one narrative in which features of a primary narrative are selected (in the process rhetoric calls amplificatio) and correlated with features of a second one that then becomes the “meaning” of the first. The point-to-point allegory is then something of a reversal of the heroic simile, in which the epic poet (Homer, and following him Virgil and the whole epic tradition) embellishes a given action with a large-scale comparison:

Now when the men of both sides were set in order by their leaders,
The Trojans came on with clamor and shouting, like wildfowl,
as when the clamor of cranes goes high to the heavens,
when the cranes escape the winter time and the rains unceasing
and clamorously wing their way to the streaming Ocean,
bringing the Pygmaian men bloodshed and destruction:
at daybreak they bring on the baleful battle against them. (Book III, 1–7)⁵

The comparison unifies the overall action of the multitudinous Trojan army charging forward, reducing it to a single sensuous feature, namely the war cries, before developing under its own momentum into a fulldress autonomous action in its own right: as though the very mention of the cranes evoked a whole dimension of being—their southern migration when winter comes, the perils of the journey, and the final murderous arrival, when the ferocious birds attack the Pygmies in their homeland on the other side of the world—a myth attested to in many different cultures. The simile, therefore, with a mind of its own, hones in on the bloody climax of a noisy and disordered clash, which it has first organized and aestheticized into the graceful figure of a single flight of birds. This parallel development cannot be said to produce a structure in which the meaning of one narrative is revealed in the form of a second one: at this stage, the movement is reversible, and the legendary story of the cranes can be said to be fully as much illuminated by its reversal of the Greek’s invasion of Troy as in the standard reading, which, however, it revises into the inevitability of a natural and indeed instinctual impulse. The defending Trojans hate the Greek invaders as viscerally as the invading cranes hate the defending Pygmies; meanwhile, the stops and starts of the Greek invasion (assembling the allies, becalmed without wind in port, dissensions, leadership quarrels, and so on) are somehow themselves effaced by the identification with a well-nigh unconscious will to battle.

This two-level heroic simile must not, however, be confused (as it so often tends to be) with metaphor, with which it has only this in common: that when the latter is inspected in detail and considered to have distinct and separate parts and features—my love is like a red, red rose: what are its petals, its stamen, why red, what about its scent, and so on—metaphor tends to become simile in its own right. But the effect of metaphor, in a narrative, amounts to the latter’s denarrativization: the horizontal momentum is disrupted, we pause on a vertical association and linger in some metaphorical perpetual present (or eternal present, out of time), which brings to a halt that onward rushing temporal momentum that the simile only tends to accentuate. Simile redoubles the power of narrative, while metaphor arrests it, transforming epic back into a lyric stasis.

In the structuralist period, such parallel structures began to be studied under the more neutral and technical term of homologies; and it was with the work of Lucien Goldmann ⁶ that this term at length achieved a general methodological acceptance, designating the search for some one-to-one correspondence between structures. In his most famous work (The Hidden God), Goldmann tried to establish a wide-ranging correspondence between the literary structures of Jansenist tragedy (particularly in Racine) and the social situation of the noblesse de robe as a class fraction doomed in its rivalry for class dominance with the “rising” bourgeoisie. The sociological diagnosis seemed original and profound, the method doubtful and unconvincing.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that an appeal to homology must always be a warning signal. The two-level system is the mark of bad allegory, insofar as it disperses the elements of each narrative line without reuniting them, at the same time opening a reversible correspondence between the two levels. Tragedy is Jansenist, but Jansenism is also tragic; meanwhile the component parts of each system tend toward autonomy and their own independent interpretations: Pascal’s bet can be seen as a reflection on the future of his class but also as part of the development of probability theory in this period. Pity and fear are traditional tragic categories; but melancholy, when attributed to a whole social class and period, is a concept with rather more clinical and psychic connotations.

We may draw on a well-known modern example of this kind of two-level allegory for further demonstration of the limits that mar its form as well as its content—“defective content resulting in defective form,” as Hegel famously put it. Albert Camus’s The Plague has traditionally been read as an allegory of the German occupation of France during World War II, what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the republic of silence”; and much ink has been spilled in arguments about the adequacy of its representation of a complex human enemy as a nonhuman plague virus. In Camus’s defense we may cite André Malraux’s representational strategy of excluding from your cast of characters figures who, like the fascists standing in for evil, repel any form of empathy or novelistic understanding. (In his case, the figure of Ferral in La condition humaine then becomes an interesting problem.) But Camus’s own work suggests a reading of The Plague as a more interesting experimental departure.

The undoubted distinction of the earlier works (L’Étranger, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Caligula)—Camus viewed them as a trilogy, all staging “the absurd” in different ways and from different generic angles—turned on a unique thematic contradiction between the meaninglessness of a life destined for death (what the existential philosophers called “finitude”) and the experience of bonheur (a word a little stronger than the English happiness, I think).⁷ The point is that the latter is not some pious hope or longing, but a real experience: yet it is an experience that can only be fulfilled in an absolute present, as in Camus’ ecstatic evocation of the sun at Tipasa; while on the other end of the spectrum, absurdity is also a concrete experience, but it must be felt in that different temporal continuum of a past–present–future, what Sartre will call “the project,” a life in time. The greatness of the early “trilogy” lay in its resolute option for bonheur, for the temporality of the pure or living present: The Myth of Sisyphus offers a handbook in achieving what its memorable last sentence invited: “Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” Meanwhile, neither Caligula nor the Meursault of L’Étranger are adepts of the absurd, they are both in fact happy, in the peculiar sense with which Camus endows this word. Caligula has taken on himself the pedagogical task of imposing the lesson of the absurd on his subjects (by way of arbitrary death sentences) in order to teach them the experience of bonheur whether they like it or not; and as for Meursault, it has not sufficiently been observed that like some successful Sisyphus he is also happy and that the absurd must be imposed on him from the outside, by a death sentence passed on him for the wrong reasons by people who do not understand his life in the present, in other words by Caligula’s subjects as it were, and as though on their emperor himself.

The extraordinary quality of L’Étranger, to be sure, lay in a uniquely mechanical decision, namely to have Meursault tell his nonstory in a nonnarrative tense, the passé composé, which, as with that “style indirect libre” which Ann Banfield memorably termed “unspeakable sentences,”⁸ is never otherwise used in this narrative way. By way of language itself, Meursault becomes a strange kind of alien, catapulted into a prosaic world of humans living another temporality altogether: it is as it were a kind of science fictional estrangement effect, which can only be categorized in normal literary terms as a form of Asperger’s syndrome, of an absolute absence in Meursault of anything like empathy with other (“normal”) human beings. In that sense, indeed, the book’s title, which has been variously translated into English as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider,” might better have been simply rendered “The Alien”; and what happens to Meursault at the hands of the inhabitants of the planet on which he is condemned to live is not unpredictable.

But none of these remarkable formal solutions is appealed to in The Plague, in which Caligula’s lessons are administered to the inhabitants of Oran in an already contingent, accidental, and indeed meaningless way: the epidemic is itself absurd avant la lettre and in advance, and fragile and ephemeral moments of bonheur reduced to mere psychological experiences. This is, if you like, an experiment in projecting Camus’s unique temporal contradiction onto a realistic representation, which one must also call political insofar as its framework is essentially that of a collectivity.

This is why what in the trilogy had all the formal freshness of a genuine crux has here evaporated into sheer moralizing; the paradoxes of the great moralistes, from Pascal to Machiavelli, from La Rochefoucauld to Gracián, have here been drained of their savor and flattened out into academic philosophizing. The dualism of the allegory conceals a false premise, that the politics of World War II has something in common with epidemiology and quarantine: this may well have been the way the inhabitants of Algeria lived it. But the outcome, for us as readers, is a liberal humanism in which the two incommensurable dimensions of history and the body are illicitly identified. This is bad allegory at its most consummate. (Indeed, if one wanted to indulge the interpretive faculty by transforming this reading into the more complete fourfold system, it might not be too far-fetched to assign the medical diagnosis to our third, or “moral,” level, while the fourth collective one could translate it precisely into that story of an alien lynched by a mob of incomprehensible humans hypothesized above. As for the text, perhaps the chronicler Rieux simply translates Caligula’s unique character into a paradigm of disabused observation and wisdom, if not contemplative science as such while the besieged Oran is the figure of a closed community surrounded by even more incomprehensible adversaries, whether Nazi, Muslim, or toxic parasites one can never quite be sure.)

I will, however, suggest that this dualistic allegory is in fact more easily understood as a regression to mere symbolism; and that it is in fact the logic of the symbol—that Romantic conception which overwhelmed the older allegories at the moment of bourgeois modernity—which has usurped the more complex allegorical structure alone capable of doing justice to Camus’s attempt to expand his insight into absurd experience out beyond its individual boundaries. The Plague offers at least this advantage, of allowing us to diagnose the ideological after-effects of this reduction to symbolism and one-to-one allegory. They are humanism and (as we shall see shortly) the thematization of science. Indeed, I will go even further here and suggest that all such dual allegorical structures are essentially humanist in spirit and assert the meaning of their narratives to be an expression of the “human condition.” In yet a different perspective, they all affirm the presence of meaning; and meaning always tends to affirm the existence of a human nature as a normative metaphysic (even when the larger nature into which it is inserted carries the meaning of “absurdity”). Homologies are always what we may term bad allegories, and they reenact those bad readings of Hegel in which opposites are always reunited into this or that “synthesis.”

We may then also draw the provisional consequence that genuine allegory does not seek the “meaning” of a work, but rather functions to reveal its structure of multiple meanings, and thereby to modify the very meaning of the word meaning. It is indeed part of the contemporary critique of metaphysics (and of humanism along with it) to denounce the conception of nature as meaningful: an affirmation not merely of a meaningful system at work in the natural world, but also of a human nature as well, one which virtually by definition is normative. It will be clear, then, that this naturalization of both meaning and metaphor alike is the function of the symbol, as opposed to the allegorical structure.

I should add that as it is convenient to continue to use the term symbolic for figural moments in general, here I restrict the identification of such appropriations by the ideology of the symbol to the language of dualistic or two-level, point-to-point allegories, as distinguished from the multileveled systems we are about to confront. Still, confusion may also arise when we attempt to distinguish such complex allegorical systems as those of Bunyan or Kafka from the dual and oversimplified “allegorical” readings they have so often inspired. (Such readings or interpretations are indeed numerous enough as to seem to demand a fourfold allegorical analysis in their own right: this is then the moment to distinguish allegory from allegoresis and to affirm that the latter can also be allegorical in its own right—a regrettable complication that I return to in the concluding chapter.)

But the case of Kafka does suggest that it might be desirable to make a place for such a concept as the “allegorical frame”—a dual or metaphorical framework or setting in which a more properly complex (in fact, fourfold) structural development takes place. As a contemporary version of this structure, consider a remarkable and relatively recent film by Jia Zhangke, The World (2004), in which the setting seems to confirm a simple metaphoric identification of the “real” world of contemporary China with the Disneyland-type theme park which is its subject and which purports to register all the noteworthy “sights” of that real world around China (the Eiffel Tower, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, and so on). Within this frame, however, which seems to convey the familiar message that late capitalism is a world of simulacra, a good deal else takes place “realistically”—complex social relations susceptible of a different kind of allegorical reading in their own right.

To pronounce the word fable in connection with Kafka suggests not only the solution of the matter of bad or dualistic readings but also the transition to be made from these systems to the more conventional tripartite ones to be discussed in a moment. What will be absent from the fourfold system of interpretation as such, but what informs these two (dual and tripartite) unsatisfactory forms that precede it, is precisely a kind of pedagogical intent. Platonic myth can be added to the fund of examples here: not only does Plato’s practice reinforce the development of allegory and interpretation in the philosophical and scholarly traditions that follow him, they set a stunning example of the strength of the two-level or dual allegory as a pedagogical temptation. This temptation is not only to be attributed to the institutional guild of the authorized readers and interpreters who practice it: it also accounts for the affiliation between the dual structure itself and the ideology of humanism with which we have associated it.

But there is also a way in which the question of pedagogy itself can provide the most plausible transition from the dual allegories in question here to the tripartite structures to be examined next. For pedagogy itself becomes a kind of third term, particularly when its seemingly objective and disinterested practice invokes the whole thematics of science and knowledge, which is, as we shall see, the central motivation and driving force of the tripartite scheme. Humanism or science? These two seemingly antagonistic “disciplines” (reflected in the very structures of the modern university system) are dialectically inseparable from one another, insofar as nature and human nature are part and parcel of the same fundamental metaphysic. This is what remains to be demonstrated in the next section.

The tripartite allegorical scheme seems to have originated in the commentaries on Homer during the Alexandrian period (most notably by the Stoics); but the origins of the system probably go back much further in time, as is appropriate for the organization of culture around a single work which is then called on to answer a variety of questions to which epic narrative was never designed to respond. Unlike the later biblical commentaries, however, and particularly in the decay of paganism and polytheism, these questions turn out to be essentially cognitive rather than religious and prophetic.

Here then, we confront the Homer, not of the heroic simile, but rather of the interminable hand-to-hand combats and the numerous battlefield encounters as tedious as they are gruesome, which inspired Goethe to say that reading The Iliad was like being vouchsafed a glimpse into Hell. Battles, however, are frequent staples of formal allegories: Spenser and Goethe are full of them, as we shall see, while Dante is by the very nature of his climb spared the representational problem of warfare. Our reference here will, however, be the Psychomachia of Prudentius. One cannot say that either Homer or Prudentius finds any truly elegant solution to the representational monotony of the multiple hand-to-hand combats of such epic scenes (all the more reason to admire Virgil’s artful variations on such obligatory generic episodes).

Homer was certainly a central or canonical text in antiquity, if not a sacred one: Alexander slept with the Iliad under his pillow, and the great age of the text itself, which, even if redacted under Pisistratus, breathed the air of an ancient lost heroic era, ensuring its binding authority for generations who interrogate it as you might consult an oracle. Unsurprisingly, then, the “interpretation” of Homer became a respectable practice and took many forms, among them not least the tripartite allegorical reading we mean to examine here.

Equally unsurprisingly, the most propitious sections of Homer for such reading will not be those famous dramatic moments of which Achilles is the protagonist, or in which Hector bids farewell to his tiny son (“terrified by as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair / Nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet”; Book VI, 469–70).⁹ Rather, interpretation will be called in to wreak its wildest ravages in precisely those passages in which senseless slaughter rages, namely, the interminable battle scenes, the sequences of hand-to-hand combat.

What the tripartite interpreters found in such passages, however, was something more than a mere formal alibi: it was science itself, knowledge as such, but knowledge of a far more systematic and organized kind than the simplistic parallels of Camus’s epidemiology.¹⁰ For here the individual characters are called on to play their signifying roles; and in a reversal of what will later become the practices of personification, these mortal combats and duels will project their newly endowed meanings into outer and inner space, and become, although dehumanized, profoundly epistemological. Homer’s battle scenes now become symbolic of the passions (as later on in Prudentius) but also of the atoms as they form the very building blocks of the universe and in their attractions and repulsions make up the very fabric of matter. Greek atomism is indeed no doubt to blame for these exercises, for in its various forms a dialectic emerges in which it is the very notion of the atom itself that generates its own multiplicities: being the One, it can only reproduce itself as another One, which it must therefore repulse as nonessential, at the same time that its identity with itself necessarily attracts. The idea of the One therefore becomes inseparable from that of the Many, as Hegel demonstrated in the Logic.

Meanwhile, it is as a presage in that history of the emotions (to be examined in Chapter 2) that the various shapes and figures of the psychic battleground declare themselves, beginning no doubt with the four humors and their interactions and gradually perpetuating a more elaborate characterological chart and the rudiments of a whole psychology.

The two levels scarcely intersect one another, save as specimens of an atomistic thinking they both share and which at this stage is developed into more elaborate cosmologies and philosophies. But what is inadequate about this projection of twin “sciences” of physics and psychology onto what was for them a historical text is not the rudimentary nature of these two systems (for we still “believe” in atoms, and in the passions as well no doubt), but rather the way in which representation as a philosophical problem has been excluded from what is as objective as an astrological chart or a personal horoscope. It is this exclusion that makes them “defective” in Hegel’s profound sense and which alerts us to the fundamental flaw in the tripartite scheme as such. Leave aside the question of fiction and scientific fact, as anachronistic in this period as it has come to seem ideological in our own, what the tripartite scheme omits is the process of interpretation itself; and insofar as allegory is itself allegorical, the peculiarity of this particular practice is that it in fact presents us with the strange case of a nonallegorical allegory.

The “defect” of the tripartite allegory can then perhaps be generalized: it lies in the utilization of this form of reading or interpretation for epistemological purposes, and it includes knowledge as such (science). In effect, it paradoxically confirms Croce’s dogmatic exclusion of knowledge from the aesthetic (see Chapter 7) but in a way that would have horrified him, namely by identifying what is illicit in these allegories—as not the cognitive, but rather the expressive itself.

A modern example will perhaps strengthen this assertion, particularly one that stresses the unavoidably representational dilemmas confronted by language in the modern period and thereby implies the need for any adequate modern allegory to include the very problem of representation within its own structure.

This is indeed what seems to me at stake in philosophical or psychological works that attempt to deal with consciousness itself as a central problem, or in other words as an issue to be solved. Literature obviously has no choice when it comes to incorporating such specialized problems and must do so by way of the familiar techniques of internal monologue, style indirect libre, and so on. But philosophies are free simply to avoid the issue of consciousness as such, so that when, in spite of everything, they choose to tackle it head-on, the results can be enlightening for literary and linguistic study (even where the latter have already decided that such philosophical and psychological languages belong to literature in the first place anyway).

Among many other such philosophical attempts, Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained can serve to illustrate the untimely resurgence of the allegorical in the midst of a text ostensibly devoted to what the philosophers call “argument.” Actually, analogies abound in this work, in which, for example, the notion of distinct mental functions so dear to Kant and revived by neurophilosophy takes the more “literary” form of “multiple drafts,” in which we rewrite our experiences over and over again in a process that aims at describing the approximations of thought in terms of media reproduction, “knowledge” becoming simply the final or published version.¹¹ Here it is the multiplicity of the media (longhand, word processing, Internet publication, and so on), which offer a one-to-one analogy with the various states of consciousness to be unified in any satisfactory theory of the latter.

At this point, however, I need to lay my own cards on the table and to explain that for me consciousness is impersonal (in Sartre’s and Husserl’s sense)¹² but above all that it is unrepresentable, as Colin McGinn has powerfully argued.¹³ We are in consciousness as the fish in water; we are never, not even in the deepest sleep or coma, truly nonconscious, and therefore there exists no Archimedean point outside of consciousness from which we might adequately describe, let alone, explain it phenomenologically (and as for the brain, it must always remain the brain of other people or of the forensic anatomist). I am therefore disposed in advance to consider all theories of consciousness as literary exercises.

(This is then one of those problems that confirm one’s conviction, not only that philosophy—call it theory, or simply thinking, if you like—cannot ever solve problems but only articulate them; but further than that, that its problems are of the type that must continue to be posed in full conviction that they can never be resolved: the subject–object problem is of this type, an antinomy that must be reenacted in every generation inasmuch as the reformulation of its impossibility will necessarily prove to be historically original and therefore operative. Historical failure is valuable because it is historical, not because it is a failure.)

From this perspective, it is thus of the greatest interest to find that, for his ultimate version of the multiplicity of mental functions exercised by “consciousness,” Dennett has recourse to an extended figure, the crew of a ship. Full consciousness will then be a provisional, a temporary crisis state, in which these various functions are summoned to some supreme act of collective cooperation by the alarm signal of an “All hands on deck!”

It is an ingenious if profoundly allegorical solution; and we therefore find in Dennett’s book yet another tripartite system in which the textual object—the undoubted existence of this mysterious thing called consciousness—is endowed with two parallel figurations: that of the media and that of the working collective, neither of which intersects, but whose “explanatory” combination, the tripartite allegory, confirms the essential humanism of this structure. It is, however, not necessarily an anthropomorphic structure: rather, it is an ideological one, in which structuralist and Nietzschean ideas of the syntactical tyranny of the so-called “centered subject” are refuted by this democratic image of centrality as a transitory moment, in which, as in the ancient polis, the “dictator” is summoned only to deal with a crisis, after which he is summarily dismissed or even banished. (That these seemingly complete thought-figures—the tripartite ones—could be enlarged to greater comprehensibility by simply adding a fourth term seems in principle possible if one is willing to change the whole tenor of the experiment. Thus, the band of sailors would become a certain type of community, which would lend the momentarily emergent commanding consciousness a certain wish-fulfilling egotism.)

It is not necessary to underscore the kinship of this allegorical conception of consciousness with liberal American political thought in general (and with its internal contradictions). What I have wanted to argue here is that this judgment is not ideological and that tripartite allegory can rather be accounted a bad allegory insofar as it is incomplete. In the next section we will show how the fourfold system completes it in a way that utterly restructures the homologies of this incomplete form: suffice it to say for the moment that the latter lacks reflexivity (to use a term I dislike for philosophical reasons, as I will also explain). For the moment, it is enough to suggest that it is this very defect of the tripartite form that renders it apt for the generation of ideologies such as those of humanism and scientism. A contemplative stance is imposed on it by virtue of its very structure qua knowledge and can only result in the production of ideology as such, which is to say, of metaphysics or of what Heidegger called world-pictures.

It is here, then, that some long-postponed numerological debate might be expected to surface. I have denounced the homological allegory: but surely, in order to reach four, it would be as easy to reduplicate its duality as it would be to add another level to the three of the tripartite alternative. Isn’t some theoretical justification of fourness as a more adequately complete system required, along with a justification for the requirements of completeness in the first place? Cardinal numbers are meanings, after all, as the philosophers of number have assured us; and in this particular context, do we not have to take into consideration the claim of other numbers as well? Nobody has so far come forth as a defender of the five or the six, as far as I know: but certainly the seven has all the mystical significance one could wish for, and this despite the early theologians’ assurance that, in a pinch, the seven could always be reduced to a four. As for the latter, I suppose that its reduction to a simple duality could be refuted by the Greimas square (see Appendix A). The fourfold is there shown to be not some replication of two simple dualisms added together, but rather a distinction between two kinds of negations, each one of which generates a different opposition of its own. These negations are not simple homologies of each other; they produce four distinct terms, and it is this set of four terms (and their own combinations) that is referred to as a system.

Indeed, having just expressed some doubt as to the relevance of science and truth in the tripartite system, I may now venture a naturalistic defense of the fourfold. In that spirit, it would be possible to evoke a whole acoustic system, in which a given note of the scale, functioning as a musical tonic, comes into the world with its own implicit (or unsounded) dominant, its tritone, the virtuality of its modulation into minor and major, along with a host of overtones and undertones, vibrations that imperceptibly accompany the central vibration on which our hearing and our perception is for the moment centered and whose logic extends over a shorter or longer period of auditory attention. So it is that for this bodily sense a whole elaborate system or auditory totality accompanies the attention to a single note: is this correlation of subject and object something natural (or in other words grounded in some deeper ontological relationship between the human sensorium and the physical vibrations inherent in our material universe)? Is it historical, so that the whole system is somehow modified when we pass from “Western” music or in other words from tonality back into the various kinds of modal systems in use in other cultures?¹⁴ But could we not argue that both systems—the tonal and the modal—are natural and historical at one and the same time?

At any rate, such speculations are based on a conception of system that is not difficult to transfer to meaning itself, grasped from an essentially ideological standpoint. One might then construct an elaborate comparison (or indeed an “allegory”!) in which a term, a theme, or an ideologically charged word at once brings with it a set of unspoken relationships that organize our immediate attention and give value to a discursive sequence in which our starting point is confirmed, denied, qualified, modified, and so forth. The fourfold scheme would then be just such a system: one whose primary field of activity lies in ideology, but whose operations and effects are here deployed in the realm of narrative.

I will not expound this fourfold narrative system at any great length: its founders and practitioners (among whom Origen [AD 185–254] is generally credited as its inventor) posited the events of the Old Testament as a literal text in which a different and future event was prefigured. Thus famously the descent of the Hebrews into Egypt, grasped as an event that really happened in history, is also read as a foreshadowing of Christ’s descent, after his crucifixion and death, into Hell (where Dante will show the visible and cataclysmic signs of his passing); their exodus from Egypt then clearly prefigures the resurrection; and these twin events, taken stereoscopically, may also serve to characterize the wallowing of the soul in sin and earthly misery and its emergence into salvation by way of a radical conversion. At the same time, this earthly and individual parallel also prefigures the fate of the collectivity itself, which can be redeemed by the Last Judgment, or in other words, a wholesale spiritual awakening or religious revolution.

These distinct meanings—which can most conveniently be called levels of meaning—can then be schematically rendered, along with their theological names, as follows:

ANAGOGICAL: the fate of the human race

MORAL: the fate of the individual soul

ALLEGORICAL or MYSTICAL: the life of Christ

LITERAL: (in this case) the coming up out of Egypt

Now it will at once be clear that such “meanings,” as they arise from level to level, are of quite different kinds, and more than that, that the transitions between them are quite different from one another. I have evoked the stereoscopic simultaneity of the relationship of the literal and allegorical levels, which Auerbach called figural; and in which they stand to each other as letter and fulfillment. But that rather academic relationship (signifier and signified) opens a rather different allegorical pathway than the prophetic one, in which the earlier event somehow “literally” prophesies the later one, or does so by way of the mediation of great prophecy and its lonely and legendary virtuosi. These two allegorical relationships are themselves allegories of rather different kinds: the one a figure of exegesis implying a priestly interpreter or scholar; the second a whole narrative of loneliness and persecution, of the Cassandra-like doomed warning and the great unheeded cry, verging on a curse: “Woe to the bloody city of Litchfield!” Here, then, we glimpse the truth of that paradoxical warning enunciated at the beginning of this chapter, namely that allegory is itself allegorical, that it contaminates its environment with a disturbing ferment.

Indeed it was to have been expected that the unique unity of any tripartite system (turning under its own weight from one configuration to another, without a center, doomed to fall out into a pair opposed to an excluded point) would face a different kind of structural danger when enlarged into a fourfold arrangement. For the latter, if not somehow internally reinforced, risks a disintegration into two pairs each of which seems able to lead a life of its own, and thereby to return us to the dualism we have spent so much time denouncing. On the one hand, the text and its allegorical interpretation, on the other the individual and the collectivity. Each of these pairs is fundamentally ideological when taken on its own; the bet of fourfold allegory lies in its promise to hold all four levels together in an original and somehow inseparable unity, albeit a unity of differences.

This dilemma emerges most vividly when we examine the quite distinct emergence of the third or “moral” level from the initial pair from which it emerges (and from their differences from each other, which is then quite “different” from this new “difference”). For it is not evident that the new level consists in any direct or immediate translation of either level into the psychic (or, I would prefer to say, the psychoanalytic) realities of the soul; rather, it is grounded on a properly symbolic relation between them. Conversion, therefore, would seem itself capable of being grasped differently according to the way that more fundamental relationship is construed. (Thus, in the limited possibilities already mentioned, one might imagine exegetical conversions of a more intellectual type being distinguished from prophetic or charismatic ones.) At any rate, this emergence of the moral level from the two initial ones is of a quite different type (the alteration offering a clue as to the origin of the twofold system described earlier and its radical insufficiency).

One may then suggest that later attempts to posit the practices of the soul, or in other words, the construction of subjectivity, as so many attempts to “imitate” the life of Christ (as in Thomas à Kempis’s original version or in the Loyola spiritual exercises); can be understood as so many efforts to reconstruct some more direct and immediate signifying link between this third level and the second or allegorical one, without passing through the original allegorical structure or sequence.

With the fourth or political level, meanwhile, even more complex interrelationships come into play: for it is not at all excluded that this fourth or collective meaning might well overshoot the third or individualistic one and return to its immediate literal and historical model as the example of a whole people breaking its chains and seceding (whether literally or figuratively) from the repressive society in which it finds itself. And as for the second allegorical level as such, does it not itself already propose the possibility of a peculiar form of narrative extrapolation in which Jesus takes the place of the ultimate political prophet and assumes the role of his prototype Moses in that first revolutionary historical event which, now reversing its allegorical reference, rewrites the very life of which it was to have been the prophecy in a kind of retroactive potentiation? The purely moral level then would then come as a supplementary interpretative and individual commentary of a far more fully formed and fleshed out anagogical or collective meaning.

Such complexities and symbolic alternatives are then something like the Ptolemaic epicycles of the original levels, and explain the variants in which the original four levels are traditionally multiplied, where, for example, the Church fathers allowed as to how the life of Christ might also be reinterpreted as the life of the Church, thereby reinstating a historical institutionality along with law, obedience, and other hierarchical features not necessarily foreseen in the original paradigm. These “epicycles,” as we have called them, are based on an original synonymy that makes for the richness of the scheme and will be reexamined in the conclusion in which the fourness common to both the fourfold scheme of the levels and the four basic terms of the Greimas square are compared and “reconciled.”

It is no doubt possible, and even desirable, to grasp the fourfold scheme in its own historicity and its own immediate situation and function, something we have already sketched out for the patristic moment of a universalizing Christianity. Its revival here then clearly has its own political motivation as well, for on my reading the modern differentiation between public and private, between the logic of the collectivity or the mode of production and the existential life of the individual, is intentionally inscribed in its third and fourth (moral and anagogical) levels, which may be said to find their distinct dynamics in psychoanalysis and Marxism, respectively. As for the two fundamental levels on which the whole edifice is founded, we may say that the allegorical or mystical key—the interpretive code by which the reading of the literal level or “current situation” is governed—will vary ideologically. It would be ridiculous, for instance, to take anything like the life of Marx himself, however admirable it may have been, as a prototype of anything but the political intellectual; but, as with the “imitation” of Christ, there are certainly followers willing enough to find their spiritual models in the great revolutionaries or prophets of history, from Saint Paul to Trotsky or Che Guevara. Meanwhile, it matters very much whether this same fundamental allegorical level is grasped in terms of the dynamics of capitalism as it exists now or of some future mode of production, whether socialism, communism, or Utopia: that is, the very structure and function of the system changes depending on whether it is designed to elicit an analysis of the immanent laws of a world to which there is no alternative, or on the contrary to interrogate the signs of radical change and the foreshadowings of some radically different world to come. It seems possible that the allegorical level may also be read in terms of the medium by which it is transmitted, or, in other words, as a form of autoreferentiality.

At any rate, the two initial levels of an allegory form a dual narrative, which demands a peculiar and specialized kind of reading (Benjamin named it the dialectical image): we might call it a synoptic one, in the sense in which both narratives are to be attended to simultaneously. The older narrative retains its literal status, its events have really happened, they are not to be dismantled like so many hieroglyphs or esoteric signs. Do they lose their substance, waning into ghostly simulacra like so many prophetic dreams? It would seem not, for they constitute the history of the clan from which Jesus himself descends. Something similar can be said for Benjamin’s reversal of the conventional historical framework, for whom the past erupts into the present and is reborn in it like a tiger’s leap, the spirit of Robespierre reinvigorating that of Lenin, the spirit of Spartacus reborn in Che.¹⁵ In the sense in which the New Testament fulfills the Old, it is the allegorical reading that somehow takes precedence over its literal foreshadowing; the older history was incomplete, the newer one is its fulfillment. (To be sure, Marxism certainly affirms something similar about those earlier revolts that prefigured the revolutions of capitalism, while the older castes and hierarchies of domination are not yet the two modern dichotomous social classes even though they seem to foreshadow them.)

So even a reading of Christian allegory will seek to preserve the substance of the original or literal text, at the same time that it suggests reservations about the latter’s conventional historiography, its system of representation, which omits the prophetic dimension and sinks back into mere chronicle. This very possibility, however, alerts us to the importance of the historical situations in which the practice of allegory is revived out of need, or on the other hand, discredited as a purely scholastic exercise.

A serious revival of interest in allegory can be dated to the period of “theory” that set in after World War II (and when thoughts neglected, like those of Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book of 1928, came into their own); but the seemingly definitive end of allegory as a literary value was conventionally identified with the crisis of Romanticism. (Nor is it an accident that Paul de Man’s idiosyncratic revival of the concept finds its authorization in that crisis point which inspired the work of Friedrich Schlegel, with Novalis and Coleridge, the most original thinker of the Romantic movement.) But on a more practical (and parochial) level, the already degraded form of allegory that is at that point definitively repudiated can be found in rhetoric and in the stylistic flourishes and decorations of the ancien régime, dismissed by William Wordsworth’s manifesto for plain speech. This is itself an allegorical act: for such ornament is first and foremost to be associated with its related manifestations in all the other arts (architecture, furniture, fashion, painting, music) in an uneven or nonsynchronous development that extends across the nineteenth century all the way to the triumph of a literal-minded “realism” (and to Adolf Loos’s manifesto, Ornament and Crime). But this stylistic revolution is best understood at its origins, when the decorative (hitherto associated with Baroque court culture)¹⁶ is identified as a class language, and its symbolic denunciation and abandonment associated with the bourgeois Revolution itself. (I am fond of the example of the counterrevolutionary politics of the Parisian wigmakers, who stood to lose, not merely their application of powder, but the manufacture of wigs themselves, in this not insignificant change in fashion and in taste.)

For the poets, and later on their interpreters (Schlegel and Coleridge can stand as the prototypes of both, including the trend toward a religious counterrevolution), what replaces allegory in its more fundamental structural sense is as we have seen the symbol as such. The allegorical includes differentiation in the form of the multiple publics it must capture simultaneously, the multiple languages it must coordinate; in a new period of class struggle, the symbol aims at a different kind of unison and a far more overt homogenization of its fundamental public (a context in which the word hegemony seems to impose itself). In the literary realm, this homogeneity is to be found in the emergence of the national language (and the elimination of the dialects), as well as the concept of a “national literature”—a new field which is not institutionalized until it finds its place in the new or modern university system, along with its belated invention of the “history of literature.”

The role of the symbol in all this seems to me to be a complex and essentially negative one and to accompany the fate of the increasingly delegitimated “sacred text.” The loss of the category of the canonical work can to be sure lead to the compensatory industry of producing new and “homemade” sacred texts and mythological systems, from Friedrich Schelling’s call for a new mythology to William Blake’s visionary production or William Butler Yeats’s “visions.” (In our time Jungianism has been the most successful popular version of this and the most instructive in its handling of the absence of the sacred text: it syncretically gathers within itself all the myths and religions of the past in an early version of ideological globalization.) But the more mainstream effort in promoting some new centrality of the sacred text in bourgeois culture will be the gradual emergence, in the various national traditions, of the ideal of a Book of the World (Mallarmé’s Livre, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), which aims to perform many of the functions of the older religious text by substituting the emergent national collectivity for the older cult of believers.

No one denounced this general consensus on the desirability of the symbol more ferociously than Walter Benjamin:

For over a hundred years the philosophy of art has been subject to the tyranny of a usurper who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of romanticism. The striving on the part of the romantic aestheticians after a resplendent but ultimately noncommittal knowledge of an absolute has secured a place in the most elementary theoretical debates about art for a notion of the symbol which has nothing more than the name in common with the genuine notion. This latter, which is the one used in the field of theology, could never have shed that sentimental twilight over the philosophy of beauty which has become more and more impenetrable since the end of early romanticism. But it is precisely this illegitimate talk of the symbolic which permits the examination of every artistic form “in depth,” and has an immeasurably comforting effect on the practice of investigation into the arts. The most remarkable thing about the popular use of the term is that a concept which, as it were categorically, insists on the indivisible unity of form and content, should nevertheless serve the philosophical extenuation of that impotence which, because of the absence of dialectical rigour, fails to do justice to content in formal analysis and to form in the aesthetics of content. For this abuse occurs wherever in the work of art the “manifestation” of an “idea” is declared a symbol. The unity of the material and the transcendental object, which constitutes the paradox of the theological symbol, is distorted into a relationship between appearance and essence. The introduction of this distorted conception of the symbol into aesthetics was a romantic and destructive extravagance which preceded the desolation of modern art criticism.¹⁷

But it cannot be said that, until after World War II, his voice was anything more than a decidedly minor protest.

At the same time, particularly as a reaction to the “religious wars” of the twentieth century, a multiplicity of worldviews (Heidegger called them world-pictures, Marxism ideologies) attempt to fill the vacuum of what is imagined to have been some more genuine collective belief or the “binding together” of religio. They then symbolically fight out real class struggles in the form of doctrinal disputes of all kinds, in a so-called relativism, which until recently has been protected and relatively neutralized by an unspoken confidence in the truths of “science”: a set of operations able to withstand the skepticism of the philosophers (for Heidegger as for “Western Marxism,” with its Viconian heritage, science is not to be counted as an essential “truth procedure”): until late capitalism unmasks them as so much “applied science” and instrumental activities. Science as a “worldview” has rarely nourished any would-be sacred texts, and when it does, it inevitably falls into the realm of an essentially allegorical practice.

And indeed, this fall from truth into allegory is the fate of most attempts, from Romanticism to the high modernist period, to produce a Symbol for a secular and relativistic bourgeois age. The meaning of such symbolic texts is itself allegorical, whether in an allegory of explanation (the psychic and collective life of the author) or one of structure (the raw materials of the work along with its formal solutions are themselves “symbolic” of history). But the analysis of such meanings, which comes into its own after 1945 and in particular after the abandonment of the various modernist adventures and experiments, is now called something else, namely interpretation; and when its allegorical structures become obvious and unavoidable, then it becomes identified as allegoresis, namely the reading of a text as though it were an allegory.

I have stressed the break of World War II in this hypothetical periodization (this disposable periodizing narrative) for two related reasons: first, because the collapse of the various nationalisms in that war relativized them all into so many ideologies and gradually revealed even the seemingly neutral one of political pragmatism and democracy to be a threadbare and increasingly transparent cover for the economies of late capitalism; and second, because in a few scant decades thereafter, capitalism itself discredited the nation-state and its hitherto vibrant nationalisms against the looming totalizations of globalization, for which no religions or ideologies yet existed. Marxism survived this generalized collapse as the only adequate theory of capitalism as such, even in its financial and global forms; but it has yet to invent a working ideology on the global level to replace the discredited options of social democracy and the party-state (for the good reason that a coherent form of world class struggle has yet to emerge from the transitional anarchy of this new and vaster horizon).

It is much the same when we come to so-called world literature: Goethe’s well-worn term was meant to designate the variety of intellectual debates which became visible and available in the quite distinct historical situations of the nation-states that emerged after the revolutionary and Napoleonic transitions. No doubt, we also with this term attempt to do something similar in assessing those new multiple national, cultural, and literary situations to which we are today so fortunately, after the end of colonialism, exposed. But those situations are no longer the same; and in globalization we are confronted, not by difference but by identity, by a world of standardization and a domination by multinational capitalism to which no traditionalisms, “local cultures,” “alternate modernities,” “critical regionalisms,” or multicultural variety can offer alternatives and whose structure is allegorically expressed by the hegemony of English as a global lingua franca at a moment when even the significance of the “literary” (and the older system of the beaux arts) as such is called into question by all kinds of new media.

This is then the situation in which allegory, having been discredited by bourgeois culture, reemerges as allegoresis in the dispersal of that culture and the relativization of its facts and its literal levels, its national and linguistic references, and the multiplicity of its historical situations and populations. Its renewal will be dramatized most conveniently by the account of the history of emotions outlined in the next chapter.

Of the more ambitious revivals of allegory theory, de Man’s and Benjamin’s are the most notorious. I will say why I find neither as useful nor as stimulating as I would have wished. But first it is important to situate the destiny of allegory within that larger one of rhetoric as such, of which Roland Barthes and so many others have told the story.

As a species, rhetoric seemed to have gone extinct with the last original treatise written by Pierre Fontanier in 1821. For Barthes himself, the use of the characterization, in his classic early Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), functioned as a historical foil to the emergence of style as a literary category after the French Revolution: before that, rhetoric, in the sense of public eloquence, was a universal value; after it, the private and individualistic conception of style displaced it as a literary practice. Barthes later reverted to the institutional or disciplinary use of the term, and his own idiosyncratic version of rhetoric is deployed in studies like that of S/Z (1970).

De Man’s linguistics, and in particular his revival of the rhetorical tropes, is generally associated with a whole group of tropological analysts, in particular Hayden White and the Mμ group (Rhétorique générale).¹⁸ But in my view, de Man’s use of the tropes is only one feature of a more general and more systematic metaphysical system, in which language is posited—perhaps more for dramatic and pedagogical effect than as an evolutionary position—as an inhuman faculty as it were imposed on the human animal from the outside. This is then the underside of the structuralist “linguistic turn,” too often grasped as a celebration of language, but which in fact grasps it as a profound alienation of our animal nature. Other theorists of the period, such as Jean-François Lyotard, concurred in de Man’s affirmation that language is inhuman (or nonhuman, if you prefer), as does a certain period anthropology, best illustrated by the excruciating suffering Philippe Pinel’s language teaching inflicted on the famous feral child of the Aveyron (an episode dramatized in François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage [1970]).

In reality, this rather science-fictional view of language served as a philosophical justification for de Man’s critical practice, which aimed at showing that language, in the form of the tropes, always subtly or dramatically deflected and undermined conscious intention in such a way that in a sense we always say something other than what we mean, if indeed we say anything coherent at all. (As with Sartre, then, this means that sincerity—meaning what we say—is always in “bad faith.”) This is the result of an extension of tropological theory beyond the merely figural and amounts to denying the existence of any literal or cognitive, referential language against which figuration could be tested or even perceived. Language then alone can be said to be “successful,” if not authentic, insofar as it is designed to designate its own inner tropological dynamics and thereby to admit its own communicational or cognitive impossibility. It was this specialized autoreferentiality, indeed, by which de Man specifically designated literary language as such, as a kind of “allegory” of its own determination by its tropes. Whatever abstract philosophical objections may be made to this “system” (and whatever amateur psychoanalytic or biographical interpretations may be made of it), de Man’s concrete literary analyses constitute extraordinary critical performances (of which I would personally single out the reading of Rilke as the most successful); but they are only distantly reminiscent of the work of Jacques Derrida, or of ideological analysis either, although offering models of analytical rigor in their own right. It seems to me, however, that de Man’s readings necessarily remain interpretations, even though their function is to destroy interpretation as such (which for him was “humanistic”) and that they therefore yield to allegorical analysis (in our present sense). But it is equally clear that de Man’s official concept of allegory, or even of “allegories of reading,” has little to offer in advancing the project of the present book.

De Man’s implicit notion of autoreferentiality, however (presently unnoticed in a great variety of other methods in play today), deserves a more explicit discussion in any study of allegory. It was in reality already implicit in standard characterizations of the literary modernisms as reflexive or self-conscious (terms which deserve to be denounced in an intellectual culture for which the very concept of the “centered subject” or personal identity have become suspect). The mirror may have its place in Lacanian psychoanalysis and its theory of the Imaginary, but its mysteries are incomprehensible in any phenomenological account of consciousness as such (and I leave aside the rather petty objection that a text cannot be “conscious” in the first place, let alone self-conscious). That a text can refer to itself, however, and designate itself, seems to me a useful way of characterizing the crisis of Literature (and its very reinvention) in the era of advanced capitalism, where the status of a text needs to be specified in some way for its appropriate commodification. That mark or specification will be its self-designation or autoreferentiality, and in the modernist era it can take on the very value of a meaning. Allegoresis begins when this self-specification or “self-conscious” identification of the medium or media of the text becomes its allegorical level, so that its production becomes its own allegorical meaning, a process as varied in its outcomes as modern literature itself, or, if you prefer, as the various modes of expression—writing, artistic production, revelation, information, textual reproduction, or other conceptions of writing—permit. Such “allegories” destroy the older traditional structure of the fourfold system and substitute an interplay of lateralities or transversalities, for which the act of self-designation often seems a merely secondary or incidental afterthought or side product, but one which can, however, be an essential clue for the allegorist.

Perhaps another word is in order on the topic of the work’s materiality. For many contemporary analysts, this emphasis on the henceforth mediatic status of the work (a newspaper serial or an Internet blog, a radio speech or a digital narrative) offers a more materialistic alternative to the old idealist conceptions of representation as meaning or narrative, as imaginary entities or constructed objects. Autoreferentiality would then be grasped as a material (and materialist) process, in which a given medium inscribes itself (as in Umberto Eco’s classic essay on the way in which serializing form leaves its traces in the presumably “final product” of the published novel).

Still, this valorization of the materialistic may be premature. The younger Lukács was always impressed by a concept of the prematurely deceased art critic Leo Popper, for which the latter used the word misunderstanding. (In his early and late Aesthetics, Lukács retained this nontechnical term, perhaps out of reverence for his dead friend.) But Popper meant thereby something supremely technical, namely the incompatibility between two different approaches to the work of art. The first of this is that of the artist himself, who confronts raw materials and works with their specific properties: for this seemingly materialist activity we may perhaps substitute Freud’s splendid word for the effectiveness of the raw materials from which the dream is constructed: he called it representability. The artist’s assessment of such representability in his raw materials is then radically different, and indeed incompatible, with the critic’s, with the reader’s, with the literary scholar’s; which is why the former so often heartily detests the latter and minimally holds them in contempt. For these consumers of the work, approaching it as an already completed object from the other side of the barrier of time and its production, read it as a kind of message: even Dadaist nonsense art is a meaning, and a slap in the face is a message. But what delivers this message is a completed gesture the artist is unable to see from his perspective, since he has been busy constructing it and has nothing to do with meanings or messages in the first place. Sartre liked the idea of a rug, whose underside is full of a chaos of threads that have no decorative relationship to the patterns on the other side (the meaningless sounds of the words that make up a meaningful poem, the verso of their recto).

The “misunderstanding” is then an ontological one: it can only be bridged by money and success, as when the producers of a film measure its viability, not by the reviews of the critics, but by its attendance and its drawing power. (It is true that the critics can be corrupted by the producers’ perspective and waste their time in speculations as to the film’s appeal to potential readers or consumers.)

It is conventional, if trite and embarrassing, to posit a third position as a way out of this unresolvable dilemma: a position above both that somehow reconciles them in their very incommensurability. But such a position does in fact exist, and it is that of history. The representability of the artist’s materials is a social and historical one, and it depends on the evolution of society and the historical existence of the adequate raw materials themselves (in which, to be sure, are included personalities, feelings, character types, and the like). And as for the critic’s interpretation, it is social and historical as well, inasmuch as its content is necessarily ideological. What is lost in this third position, however, is to be sure judgment itself and what is loosely called value. The third position (as in other contexts, including Hegel’s and Spinoza’s) has no time for judgment, it only contemplates the situation itself in all its historicity and necessity. It assesses the existence of the work, its possibility of coming into being, the fact of the taste and judgments of its consumers: all those things constitute the hands on the dial of history’s clock; they yield a glimpse into the ontology of the work’s present. The work’s value is then no longer aesthetic in the restricted sense of aesthetic appreciation and consumption; it is symptomatic, it tells us where we stand.

As for Walter Benjamin, his “thesis” deploys allegory in a completely different way, one which comes closer to those (often very interesting) studies of allegory in specific writers, of which there is a welcome efflorescence today. But it does so by way of the mediation of a period concept, the Baroque, which presents rather different problems. Indeed, a long and obscure philosophical introduction to The Origin of the German Trauerspiel seems, in part at least, to attempt to theorize the dual status of the idea of the Baroque, which designates a specific historical period—running, say from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth (Hamlet prematurely dating from 1599, Vierzehnheiligen from 1743), and covering the entirety of the Thirty Years’ War—at the same time that it seems to name a distinctive style not limited to any one period but perhaps more closely affiliated to that of postmodernity, as numerous current theories of the neo-Baroque argue.¹⁹ At any rate, in the context of this particular work, allegory for Benjamin becomes restricted to a specific historical period, and, unlike that second Baroque—the spirit of which it is the letter—is not further generalized as a trans-historical structure.

Oddly, however, this analysis of the Baroque is limited to the second part of Benjamin’s book, whose opening half turns on a theory of Trauerspiel (I have translated it as “funereal pageant” but the more literal “mourning play” seems to have become the accepted version), in a sharp generic distinction from tragedy. Everything points to the issue of tragedy as constituting Benjamin’s deeper interest; early essays on the subject dwell, for example, on fate, on the role of silence in its noncommunicative speech, and on the fulfilled temporality of its moments, which are no longer those of Benjamin’s famous “homogeneous time.” Trauerspiel then, which certainly flourished in the Baroque period, but whose German specimens are greatly inferior to Shakespeare or Calderon, seems to have served as a mere pretext for Benjamin to return to his central interest in tragedy, whose contrast with Trauerspiel is perhaps closer to Michael Fried’s distinction between theatricality and absorption than to the interminable debates about the difference between Shakespearean tragedy and that of the Greeks. At any rate, there is much useful incidental material in Benjamin’s readings of these German plays (the opposition between the drama of the usurper and that of the martyr, for example), and much that is truly allegorical in our present sense.

But what Benjamin really wants to call allegory is baroque decoration, which either in its state of over-ripeness or as a litter of ruins is read as an expression of Melancholy (Dürer’s famous engraving actually takes us back to 1514), of ephemerality and ultimately of death itself. It is a thematics very propitious for the interests of present-day trauma theory and much of the affect theory that develops out of it, but much less useful for structural generalization.

Meanwhile, Benjamin’s later identification of a similar process in Baudelaire (including, to be sure, the omnipresence of spleen) essentially associates itself with personification, with the great capitalized forces of Douleur or Plaisir, la Vie, la Mort, along with all the accompanying swarm of lowercase reifications of Experience that are the signs and symptoms of the construction of a new kind of bourgeois subjectivity or interieur (“allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”). Unfortunately, it is this very identification of allegory and personification by Baudelaire himself that limits Benjamin’s omnipresent use of the concept.

Indeed, one must be wary of reading Benjamin as a systematic thinker: in that, he was quite the opposite of de Man, who never composed a doctrinal treatise or exposition either, but who certainly had a theory. Benjamin had interests, but they were rarely philosophical in the disciplinary sense of the word. Meanwhile, his mode of writing, in which each sentence aims to be a complete aphorism in its own right, tends to disrupt the formation of systems and may well qualify him to stand as one of Alain Badiou’s anti-philosophers. Adorno imitated him in this but nourished a professional philosopher’s ambiguous and more purely philosophical distrust of systematic philosophy and wrote whole philosophical treatises on anti-philosophy as such (“negative dialectics”). Benjamin, however, was no philosopher; rather, all the while considering himself to be a literary critic (in a historical situation in which traditional literary criticism could no longer be practiced), he turned out to constitute a heroic precursor and role model for what followed philosophy and came to be known (inside and outside Marxism) as Theory.

Still, de Man and Benjamin share one specific relationship to the work of art, namely the insistence on the necessity to destroy it. It should be stressed that this is an aesthetic necessity: it is inherent in the reading process and all the more in that larger projection of reading and “understanding” which is interpretation (or in Benjamin’s terminology, commentary and critique). To be sure, the valences of this process are antithetical in these two practices.

Deconstruction in general—whether one reserves this word for Derrida’s practice or extends it to de Man’s rather different commerce with the text—is always a hermeneutics of suspicion. The unity and coherence of the text is always an illusion to be undermined; and it is significant that de Man enthusiastically borrows Benjamin’s own (rather theological) image to convey the violence of the breaking of the vessels. For him, however, the result is somehow always the same, never opening onto a variety of distinct historical situations in which the process is adapted. For what results from this therapeutic destruction is always the same fundamental discovery, namely that language is itself deceptive, illusory, and defective; that it always promises meanings, intentions, and coherencies on which it can never deliver. In a sense, however, the aesthetic already reclaims this discovery inasmuch as it points to its own mask, revels in its own fictionality, shamelessly avows its inauthenticities in advance. The work thereby deconstructs itself, as he pointedly reproved Derrida on their first textual encounter (the review of the Grammatology). Whatever the ultimate trend of his system, then, de Man cannot ultimately be judged to stand among the aesthetes in his critical practice, which always, beyond its promotion of the aesthetic mode over the cognitive or the communicational, keeps its eye on a kind of anthropological, if not exactly ontological, horizon beyond the individual work of art.

With Benjamin it is somewhat more complicated, if not indeed ultimately undecidable. It does not seem quite right to assign Benjamin a position within that hermeneutics of restoration, which is Ricoeur’s ultimately religious version of a Utopian conception of the text’s function; and this, despite Benjamin’s flirtation with theology, but very much on account of his resistance to Heideggerian ontology. (Heidegger and Benjamin were virtually the same age and indeed classmates at one point.) To be sure, the Frankfurt School ultimately promoted a sanitized and secular version of “restoration,” namely the notion of “truth content” (or Wahrheitsgehalt, on the order of Holderlin’s Gedichte). But this mysterious (and I would argue, largely Platonic) conception also involved the breaking of the vessels and the disassembling of the aesthetic surface, however the constellations of “truths” or Ideas he might have retained. At the same time (and like de Man), something in the work (or in nature) abetted this critical process (for which Benjamin reserved the term critique in its Kantian sense), but in his case it was time and history, which gradually stripped context and content from the truth content and allowed it to become visible in its well-nigh eternal or at least ahistorical form. It is a position, however, which does not draw Benjamin any closer to the aesthetes; however, it may suggest philosophical preoccupations (which, to placate Gershom Scholem, he liked to call theological).

Still, both these theoretical positions, with their open invocations of allegory, insist on the question of the relationship of the latter to aesthetic judgment or values, something our very choice of texts threatens slyly to elude in the following chapters. I have indeed often suggested that in the dedifferentiations of postmodernity (or late capitalism), aesthetics has become an obsolete branch of inquiry (along with philosophy itself, I suppose); but one might just as plausibly argue that in a largely commodified and consumption-oriented world, everything has become aesthetic, and old-fashioned aesthetics disqualifies itself only in the sense of its universalization; questions of taste, judgment, beauty, and the like become the existential issues of at least the privileged segment of the world’s population.

My general title suggests that whatever else it is, allegory has today become a social symptom: but of what? I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.

Above all, it will be said that the relevance of allegory is dependent on this or that dissatisfaction with what it terms the literal level, the surface of the text, history, as it simply consists in what Henry Ford memorably called “one damned thing after another”—in other words, the empirical. The historical question would then arise in connection with just such dissatisfaction, whether it is greater today than it was, and what can account for it.

I prefer, however, to move the interrogation one step back and to ground the rationale for allegory in the dilemmas of representation itself. This is to be sure a philosophical problem and a modern one at that; and inasmuch as most notions of representation (or their critiques) involve this or that mental distinction between a representation and the thing represented, it inevitably hearkens back to Kant and reawakens the distinction between a phenomenon (in effect, our subjective representation by way of the senses) and a noumenon (the famous thing-in-itself, by definition inaccessible to thought or sense perception), even if the problem of representation itself has been designed to discredit the classic Kantian solution. (Indeed, new versions of the problem have recently been placed back on the table by so-called speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, reawakened perhaps by the effacement, in this new “human age,” of a natural environment by one of man-made commodities, Lukács’s so-called “second nature.”)

As I suggested earlier, however, it may be found more practical, in most literary versions of the subject–object dilemma, to replace the word representation with Freud’s term representability, in which emphasis is placed, not on the unknowability or mystic ineffability of the object to be represented, but rather, the other way around, on the adequacies of language and the other media available to fashion a usable model of the object. This reversal has the additional advantage of bracketing metaphysical questions such as those of truth, and in particular of the truth of the representation and its adequacy with respect to the reality thereby designated.

The newer schools of thought believe themselves to have taken a mighty step forward, and indeed a world-historical one, when they affirm that their metaphysic has overcome both the epistemologically based systems and those aspiring to ontology and has replaced them with a return to the aesthetic, in the sense of poesis or making, of creation rather than of being or knowing.²⁰ For a postmodernity that revels in appearances—appearances without realities, copies without originals, Schein, semblance rather than truth, Deleuze’s rather magnificent slogan “les puissances du faux,” the appeal of the constructed rather than the Ding an sich—for such a perspective, the restitution of the aesthetic and its reassumption of its primacy as the crown of philosophy is a truly liberating prospect, which releases us from politics and history and for which the trivialization of art and the assimilation to the commodity form is not too high a price to pay.

I share some of this exhilaration but would only point out that the deeper meaning of this properly metaphysical discovery is not that of aesthetics but rather that of production: aesthetics is indeed the very allegory of production! It is constructivism that is at stake here in poesis and not consumption. If the human age is to be celebrated, and the Anthropocene given its due, it is in terms of its production of reality and not its transformation into an aesthetic image. It is the perspective of human activity (Tätigkeit), of Marxist productivism, of the construction of nature as well as of human reality, that is the truly exhilarating vision: Fichte rather than the Third Critique! Sartre rather than Whitehead! Not for nothing did Mallarmé insist that aesthetics and political economy were two sides of the same coin, the coin of the realm, the ultimate prize.

Constructivism has the additional advantage of annulling the mystiques of the ineffable and their claims about the essential unrepresentability of objects, a mystique of the unknowability of nature and the world of being. Only professional metaphysicians need to “know” such things or to wallow in theories of their essential unknowability, issues we may thankfully surrender to the theologians, if any still exist.

The objects that theories of representation need to concern themselves about today are rather those which have their origins in human activity (something which can certainly include nature as it has been remade for millennia by human activity and even more intensively humanized in the century and a half since the invention of chemical fertilizer and the green revolution, and very much including genetic experimentation). The interesting problems and dilemmas of representation today then inevitably carry with them that other much maligned conceptuality that centers on ideas of totality rather than those of matter and being: on questions of systems that transcend not only our perceptual sense organs but also our more Kantian faculties of intellectual cognition and mapping. Not the knowability of things-in-themselves, then, but the functioning of airports, with their thousands of personnel and their intricately differentiated and synchronized processes; not the meaning of the laws of gravity and the speed of light, but rather the intricate and unimaginable networks of finance capital or of data systems, worldwide communications systems, and clouds rather than the contingencies of existence of the multiverse. These new posthuman environments are unknowable only in the sense that they are so far unrepresentable; and political questions about their expansion or their modification are inseparable from those—perhaps more artistic—omens of their representability.

The signal advantage of allegorical systems over symbolic ones is that they raise just such practical issues of representability, whereas recourse to the symbol and its impoverished systems of identification tends to efface the practical problems themselves and to substitute meanings for constructions, in the long run drifting toward the religious and the mystical, if not simply the humanistic.

It is important to grasp the political consequences of such a conversion of aesthetics into constructivism, for it returns us to a progressive Marx full of enthusiasm for the modernities of his day and the scientifico-technological advances of the future; and to a Faust who lives out Nietzsche’s strong forgetfulness of the past and of guilt in the pursuit of new futures. We have to become aware of the degree to which radical efforts in the era of late capitalism have been conservative and traditionalist: Benjamin’s watchword of revolution as the emergency brake on the train of history must not be thought as the final word of Marxism, nor should his denunciation of “progress” (whether bourgeois or social democratic) become a crippling limitation on some properly constructivist socialism. The political dialectic follows the classic scientific discovery of the “conversion of energy” as well as Marx’s later discovery of “metabolism”: Umfunkionierurg was Brecht’s word for the transformation of all the unlovely advances of capitalism’s universal accelerationalisms into humanizing achievements: the transmutation of ecological disaster into the terra-forming of earth, and of the population explosion into a genuine human age, an Anthropocene to be celebrated rather than caricatured in second-rate dystopias. Aesthetization can be energizing only if it becomes the allegory of productivity and radical constructivism; the social construction of late capitalism needs to be converted and refunctioned into a new and as yet undreamed of global communism.

As for the philosophical issues posed by representation as such, my own feeling is that much of their seeming intractability is overcome by Hegel’s notion of positing. Otherness is always essentially posited: the contemplative or cognitive stance itself necessarily posits the existence of an object over against itself; and it is at this point that the question of the status or being of that object—is it in our minds? is it out there, in an inaccessible reality?—arises. Indeed, this first dilemma is a self-perpetuating one, inasmuch as an answer that seems to draw the object back into its own field of perception then projects yet another vaster field of unknowability beyond that, which quickly becomes that of the Big Other or of God as such. But it is from this initial act of positing, of separating self and other in the inaugural and purely epistemological stance, that the twin metaphysical dilemmas of idealism and realism arise: either what we call objects are in the long run phenomena, organized by our own mental functions, or, in a more naive realism, there is no such problem and that the real world offers itself to our cognition without afterthoughts, remainders, or backroom ontological mysteries. For the doctrine of positing, these dogmas are themselves generated by a false problem, namely that there exists a subject–object split in the first place, rather than a positing of that split which is itself a historical moment and a construction.

This is not to say that that historical moment is not still with us, and this is why it will be convenient to distinguish two moments in the emergence of an allegorical practice that must necessarily posit that gap from the outset, as an internal structural presupposition, rather than, as with some perhaps inexistent “naive realism,” remaining unaware of it under the assumption that language functions and that our substantialist or Aristotelian–Kantian common sense is to be trusted without further philosophical hair-splitting or the exercise of logical paradoxes.

These two moments of our allegorical alienation are those of the emergence of the name and of the formation of ideological systems. Ultimately both moments converge, and the name is itself a word caught in its own systems and drawing their tangles with it in its affirmation (“I am Hamlet the Dane!”).

Still, simple nomination—about which it is useful to remember that in French the name and the noun are a single word, le nom—allows us to pose the problem of substantialism, the Aristotelian ideology of the substance, of those separate individual things or items that make up the world and of which I am one. The name affirms this substantive unity of the so-called self, and this is why it can itself be characterized as a primal alienation. We are here in the realm of evolutionary stories (insofar as we all have names already), and of the story of some emergence of consciousness and of language as such from some primal swamp no one remembers and which is mythically expressed in the infans floating in a linguistic cloud of adult speech. This is the literary realm, so to speak, of psychoanalysis as well as evolutionary psychology, and Lacan conveniently narrates it in two distinct forms: the mirror stage, in which the infant posits its unity in the image of its body; and the repression by its proper name of the “subject-of-desire,” which the name conferred by other people drives underground (the myth of the Unconscious). (The second alienation mentioned above, the systemic one, no doubt finds its Lacanian version in the relationship between my name and the so-called Name-of-the-Father or in other words between the Imaginary and the Symbolic; but this is a doctrinal development that does not seem relevant in the present context.)

What is important for our current discussion is the kinship between the name (or noun) and personification: the latter is so closely linked with allegorical procedures as to give the impression that it is in and of itself the very quintessence of allegory as such. When allegory as a literary form begins to lose its vocation and retreat into the past, thrust like some incomprehensible structure cast into the deepest shadow by the rising sun of the symbol and of symbolism, what can be most tangibly measured and demonstrated of this world-historical transition is the falling into disrepute of personification as such (discussed in Chapter 6).

For our immediate purposes here, however, emotions are a particularly rich field in which to observe these processes at work, and that for two reasons: first, because the line between the various named emotions and the local or historical theories or theoretical systems of emotions is at best a conjectural one; the reason for which constitutes our second and primary interest in them, namely that the emotions are already systems in their own right, and that the experience of one is always a kind of alternative in which others somehow implicitly propose themselves. In other words, the individual emotion is already in itself a system of oppositions, as I demonstrate in the next chapter. The named emotion affirms the substantive unity of a state of feeling and at one and the same time replaces that seeming “substance” in a relational field, which undoes its reification.

Emotions are, to be sure, not the whole of subjectivity or subjective experience: but the examination of their construction can serve as a particularly well-articulated laboratory in which to observe the historical construction of subjectivity itself. It is essentially an allegorical construction, and this constitutes one of the fundamental motivations of the present book and its relationship to the problems of History in general.

Several technical terms have already been mentioned in passing, and more will be encountered in what follows. Some preliminary clarifications will therefore be useful, and this is particularly the case when we deal in such diagnostic abstractions as alienation and reification. The becoming other of a phenomenon is governed by the first of these, which designates everything from property ownership (the alienation of a piece of land, for example) to a making strange in which we can no longer recognize what was familiar. What is less visible in this concept is the activity of several other movements of signification, such as the unity imposed by the very process of alienation: something withdrawn from me becomes in other words a kind of unity in its own right; it unifies what was hitherto disparate for lack of a general name, and only after it is thus unified can it be treated as a kind of object. In an age in which heterogeneity and difference are the watchwords, unity and unification are suspect operations, as they may well deserve to be; but for that very reason they deserve to be acknowledged as categories in their own right, which also exercise the attraction of a certain security and domestication. It is good to be able to name things, or so it would seem; and allegory preeminently participates in that process—particularly in its religious forms sorting things out into the ethical binary, the good and the bad—thereby bringing order out of the chaos of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” even when it might have been better to dwell a while longer in that state of productive uncertainty.

Unification, meanwhile, turns processes into objects, and with this moment we reach the term reification, a term which, as Mark Twain might have put it, is not always as bad as it looks. One of the fundamental differences, indeed, between Hegel’s general philosophical values and those of Marx lies in the universal value the former attributed to objectification (it returns in Sartre’s late version of the dialectic). Hegel’s life ethic (if one wants to call it that), a stance he shared with Goethe, was that of perpetual activity, productive activity if one wants to move it closer to Marx’s own practice. However, activity (Tätigkeit) in that sense always produces, and what it produces is then beyond the self; objectified, it has become part of the outside world, it is no longer an activity but a product, in short an object: the shoes made by the cobbler, the building erected by building crew (and their architect and manager), the pile of pages heaped up by the scribbler, whether philosopher or poet.

These can now belong to someone else; and it is at this point that Marx enters the picture—Marx, who has piled up enough pages of his own to have no doubt as to the value of sheer productivity, but for whom the final product will inevitably be alienated by someone else and become the property of another—the reader, hopefully, but also the publisher, and finally the monopoly that owns the publishing house, not to speak of the political movement itself. The product then undergoes its own sea change into a commodity, a process Hegel understood well enough on the conceptual level—the Logic is packed full of such transformations—but was unable to name or differentiate when it came to what he called bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft, oddly translated into the Latinate English of “civil society”).

Such objectification/reification is also to be considered an allegorical process, the alienation of an objectifying name and its transformation into an object of exchange. We do not often enough insist on the materiality of this process, which is certainly an objectification of spirit if you like. But it is also worth pausing on a less familiar Sartrean term, the analogon, to make a place for this dimension as well. The analogon can be said to be a bodily reminder inserted into a conceptual scheme: if the body is the primal source of later understandings (and misunderstandings) and furnishes the more tangible and material categories for use in the sublimation of our abstractions, then it will not be strange to find secret materialities at work in our most hyperintellectual thought processes (some of them returning in that odd physical and material analogies Herbert Silberer found at work in the infrastructure of dreams and fantasies).²¹ Heidegger’s sophisticated folk etymologies might also be cited here; he detects the still living presence of a primitive life far closer to Being itself stored up and sedimented within the shapes and the forms of sophisticated words and modern terminologies themselves, like a shadow of the Real.

But for us here, the analogon is something like the beat that attracts our attention within the regularities of musical or poetic meter: it concentrates attention and fixes the eye on one of the levels, even where it is not itself in play in the centrally signifying or allegorical one. The analogon in this sense, however, is certainly not limited to allegory: it is the hook that seizes one in a striking metaphor, Barthes’ punctum, a bodily or gestural reminiscence, of which we are not necessarily aware but which catches our attention like a forgotten muscle. If not itself a rhetorical figure or gestus, it is surely a crucial mechanism in the operation of the tropes, a well-nigh physical sensation, a half-forgotten habit, noticed only out of the corner of our eye, which nonetheless grounds the conceptual flight of fancy and certifies the reality of the disembodied intellectual operation, that “tethers the balloon of the mind,” as Yeats puts it.

What makes the concept of the analogon particularly useful for the analysis of allegory is the way in which it separates centrality from meaning in the fourfold system. It disrupts what seems to be a static and hierarchical arrangement, and alerts us to the possibility that, particularly in the modern era, where allegory has ceased to be an official genre in its own right, the levels may be rearranged and shuffled, their relations with one another altered, the inner generation of one out of the other restructured and umfunktioniert: so it is that the literal level may turn out to lie otherwise than in the text itself, or that the allegorical key may itself turn out to be allegorized and promoted to a different status altogether (the life of Christ, so to speak, becoming itself the content of a moral level and what is to be explained, rather than what explains, as might well be the case with those examples of the “imitation” of Christ referred to earlier).

It is clear enough that with the disappearance of the sacred text, and in a modern relativism, this reshuffling of the levels will in fact be an inevitable outcome, governed now less by a sense of what is orthodox than by what catches the eye, what focuses attention. So it is that where formal attention to the language of the text is demanded, as in style studies (and perhaps in so-called “surface reading”), the letter of the text becomes a new level in its own right, as when one listens for sounds rather than meanings (de Man on Rilke) or reads a sentence for its hidden syntax. These foregrounded properties then become a texture in their own right, which is substituted for the original, and the “literal” text has become a palimpsest.

And with this reshuffling, which sets one on a search for the “method” or ideology of the interpreter, another phenomenon appears which I call laterality, but which might better be associated with Felix Guattari’s genial theorization of what he called transversality,²² namely the sweeping shifts back and forth across the levels, in which the purety of the isotopie (see Chapter 6) is rudely interrupted by cross-currents of attention and of discursive semiosis. This need not produce official monuments like the heterogeneous forms both Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin tried to generalize under the term Menippean satire: transversality occurs in every living text as it opens itself to a reading by those multiple subject positions we are all as individuals. It is not that the mind wanders in such moments: it is the text itself that shifts back and forth across its multiple levels, distracted by the multiplicity of the meanings proposed there, unsatisfied with the official ones on offer, and with an insatiable curiosity for the other, more hidden and more precious ones, that “substantifique moelle” hidden away in the Silenus box which was Rabelais’s term for his own allegories.

It would be fruitless and altogether undialectical and nonlinguistic to call all this ambiguity or even synonymity: in this respect Greimas’s transformational scheme, whose very hinges turn on multiple meanings and associative word clusters, can stand as the hidden truth of those puns so dear to the practitioners of the structuralist period—conceptual puns, indeed, which like Geryon ferry us up or down to new levels of the figural structure. Transcoding plays its part here as well, in the way in which it wreaks havoc with the definitions of the philosophers and permits a wholesale alienation of older discourses by new and more imperialistic ideologies, just as the New Testament yearned to appropriate the Old in a hegemonic gesture of ecumenical tolerance.

Indeed, we periodize by way of just such allegorical transformations; and although only one moment of historical periodization is really significant in the present work—the passage from allegory to allegoresis—it may be permitted to say a word in favor of periodization as the fundamental act of historiography. But this must be staged in the right way, not on the basis of those homologies with a single homogeneous period, which Spengler indulged in such delicious detail, but rather, à la Foucault, on the basis of breaks and mutations, seismic shifts, catastrophic emergences, and welcome disintegrations. These will then be even and discontinuous, nonsynchronous as Ernst Bloch put it, in his account of modern synchronicity;²³ and to search out such moments of radical change, from the minute to the cataclysmic, is today a more satisfying practice than the grand narratives and generalizations of yesterday’s “history of ideas.” The ontology of the present is an inventory of differences rather than identities.

In the present volume, with its long disquisition on named emotions, I have tried to offer the missing piece of the conception of affect I tried to stage in The Antinomies of Realism; so that it is the waning of named emotions and the suffusion of the void they left by nameless affect that (allegorically) underlies my present narrative of the supplanting of the official allegorical genres by new kinds of allegorical structures, a story that can also be told as the gradual replacement of personification by a language of affective sequences, a substitution of the substantialism of names and nouns by the relationality of qualitative states. Arnold Schoenberg’s wonderful idea of the Klangfarbenmelodie comes to mind: a melody made up of a sequence of timbres and the material qualities of specific instruments rather than by the series of notes generally understood to constitute a theme or a musical “subject.”

I will compare the elements and raw materials of allegory by a more general comparison, with what Lévi-Strauss called pensée sauvage (which has been mistranslated as savage mind in the standard English edition, which fails to render the adjective with its natural and spontaneous overtones, as in grève sauvage or wildcat strike; just as it ignores the pun in the French noun that designates both thought and the flower pansy). Lévi-Strauss meant this expression to mean something like a perceptual science, in which lacking the abstraction or the general term, his speakers simply chose one of its items to designate them all: a set which is part of itself, the name of a specific leaf doing double duty as the name of leaves in general. In this view, then, philosophy is the new discovery of abstraction and of general names as such, the Greeks being the inventors of this posthieroglyphic speech and thought. If pensée sauvage is the linguistic mode of so-called primitive peoples, then we are not, with Lévi-Strauss, that far from Vico himself.

Allegory is certainly not primitive in this pejorative sense; it follows abstraction rather than preceding it, and with theology develops the resources of the figural rather than of the philosophical; yet in its multiplicity it eschews an ultimate abstraction, very much in the spirit of pensée sauvage (and against the cognitive features harbored by the dual and tripartite systems). Allegory’s theoretical revival, then, after the end of the philosophical system and of metaphysics, may well be less untimely than we might think.

I will conclude this general account of the fourfold scheme of allegory by a word about its diagnostic function. It is not customary, I think, to recognize or acknowledge the structure of Alain Badiou’s four “truth procedures” as an allegorical scheme.²⁴ Yet genuine allegory is a fourfold discovery process, which explores untheorized territory in familiar texts and finds in them new (as it were) electromagnetic spectra hitherto inaccessible to the naked eye. I believe that a useful version of the process can be found in the “truth procedures” if we take those (another fourfold) to constitute an allegorical operation. Science, politics, art, love—such are the “generic” zones in which these truth procedures operate, the latter consisting for Badiou in a fundamental “fidelity to the Event.” The Event, like the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, is always in the past, which is why fidelity to it involves something like its reinvention in the present. I have found it helpful to juxtapose this “political ethic” with Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism, which defines such an approach to the past as seizing

hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now [Jetztzeit] which he blasted out of the continuum of history … a tiger’s leap into the past.²⁵

For Benjamin this authentic (yet intermittent) fidelity to the past is anything but nostalgic or retrospective: transforming a “homogeneous” continuity of time into the moment, the Jetztzeit, the time of the now, the grand soir, it affirms the existence of the Event in the present, incarnated and resurrected, fulfilled, while retaining the older theological figure. It thereby endows the resurrected Event with that supreme value that governs all four truth procedures and which is Innovation or the modernist “Make It New,” as in Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific history as the paradigm shift that breaks through “normal science” and changes everything. Benjamin’s version has the merit of showing that it is only when the older Event, the memory of an Event in the past, comes as Novum or radical innovation (that is, as the New as such) that we can recognize the authenticity of such an operation and indeed grasp its significance.

The Kuhnian version then gives us a way of understanding why science itself can be counted among the Badolian truth procedures: this is not scientism (a rigorous observance of scientific orthodoxies) or some Western idolization of the scientificity of empirical facts, nor is it the promulgation of the “truth” of past doctrine; it is rather the passionate pursuit of revolutionary paradigm change, such as that embodied in Cantor’s set theory, which indeed sets the standard for Badiou’s other procedures. That of art is modernist innovation, the creation of new languages; that of politics as the emergence of new forms of struggle and new ideals of revolutionary transformation; that of love as the discovery of radically new experience in the place of the familiar words and names, the place of the incomparable as it supersedes fading memories of what is here reinvented as though for the first time. (The domain of love, indeed, is a rare concession of Badiou’s system to what looks like individual or phenomenological experience; he would no doubt reply that Beatrice is not an individual experience, contrary to what the cover of his Théorie du sujet seems to attest, reproducing Henry Holiday’s pre-Raphaelite painting of Dante’s first meeting with her.)

It will thereby be seen that the four truth procedures are all in some sense “the same” and that the quest for and inauguration of the New in the form of the Event is what they all have in common, and what drives us forward in our rewriting of the four topics—politics, science, art, love—as so many versions of the endowment of Truth as such. But this is precisely why the whole Badolian scheme of things here is sometimes other than a mere set of homologies. Profoundly allegorical, it rewrites all these different materials and topics in the spirit of a single master-narrative that is common to all of them. Yet at the same time, the operation is a “discovery procedure” whereby new evaluations and interpretations are provided by the process of comparing the different generic narratives.

Thus, in his account of the eternal debate between Marxism and psychoanalysis at the end of The Theory of the Subject, Badiou not only affirms his allegiance to both traditions but also uses them against one another in an attempt to verify and evaluate their respective fulfillment of the generic “truth procedure.” Rather than the old Freudo-Marxian attempts at this or that “synthesis” of two traditions, Badiou assesses their relative dynamics, the stages through which each dimension passes in its quest for truth, that is, in its saturation of the field of reality such that each one becomes its own Absolute, allowing us to affirm alternatively that everything is political or that everything is psychoanalytic. This final stage of saturation of Leibnizian “indiscernibility” is not the Truth but rather the sign that we are fully engaged in the appropriate “truth procedure.”

What in fact happens in this specific confrontation is that Marxism or the political level is found to pass through a three-stage process on its way to fulfillment: first, there is the awakening to class; then the passage to action in the great insurrections; and finally the attainment of a kind of Platonic Idea of communism, the isolation of the authentic consciousness of the proletariat as such.

The properly allegorical procedure will then involve, not an imposition of these three stages on another dimension of reality (in this case, the psychoanalytic one), but rather an inspection of the latter to determine the completeness with which its development there fulfills the standard set by the political realm. It turns out that psychoanalysis only knows two of the three moments or stages in question: the discovery of the unconscious and then the turn toward the second topic (that of Eros and Thanatos, the so-called death wish). This movement is replicated in Lacanian psychoanalysis with first, the differentiation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and second, the turn toward the drive or “pulsion” in Seminar XI. But the third stage is lacking, and this absence very much corresponds to Freud’s own hesitations about the “cure” (“Psychoanalysis Terminable and Interminable”) and Lacan’s own later doubts (which are inscribed in the theory of the Sinthome, the neurotic “complex” with which one agrees to live, or which one “chooses,” to use the more appropriate Sartrean language). But what would some third moment turn out to be, on the psychoanalytic level?²⁶

We can only conjecture the shape of this absence on the basis of the other truth procedures themselves. Whether that of science involves a development that can be readily theorized is unclear: it would certainly involve a transformation of the empirical facts into the kind of universality of which the Platonic Idea gives a figural hint: but presumably in the expansion and suffusion of mathematics and set theory throughout the Real we would eventually come upon something like Badiou’s four truth procedures. As for love, its secrets are already revealed in Dante: a purely individual infatuation that is transformed into a universal love beyond all individuality.

The truth procedures then can be seen as Badiou’s version of a logical differentiation between the particular and the universal and a narrative reinvention of some quasi-mystical journey from one to the other. That the whole scheme is an allegorical one is now clear in the way in which a single abstract progression is then projected onto its various levels and embodiments. The demonstration will also have driven home, I hope, the point that modern allegory involves a kinship between processes, unlike the personifications of classical or traditional allegory: it is the interechoing of narratives with one another, in their differentiation and reidentification, rather than the play with fixed substances and entities identified as so many traits or passions, for example, incarnated in individual figures all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical. We will find ourselves reverting again and again to this insight: that it is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity.