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ABSTRACT
Paul de Man's writings on allegory are significantly influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin. Nevertheless, Benjamin is conventionally perceived as semireligious and pathos-laden, whereas de Man is described as secular and emotionless. A close reading of selections from the two authors' works (in particular Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and de Man's Blindness and Insight) complicate this distinction, and the stereotypes supporting it. Both de Man and Benjamin help us to question the accepted borders between the emotively charged and the detached, the sacred and the profane, the redemptive and the nihilistic-hence their controversial yet unflagging resonance in contemporary culture.
In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it.
-Walter Benjamin1
I intend to take the divine out of reading.
-Paul de Man2
One of Paul de Man's most original contributions to contemporary literary theory is a new formulation of the concept of allegory. De Man was perhaps the last great scholar of the twentieth century to deal with allegory, and he took upon himself the very difficult task of both giving a systematic definition of the concept and using it as a reading strategy. In order to fully understand and appreciate de Man's work on allegory, it is essential to consider it in relation to Walter Benjamin's writings on the subject. I propose to show how and where Benjamin's influence is present in de Man's reflections on allegory, and how de Man both absorbed and resisted this influence.
After some general considerations regarding de Man's reading of Benjamin, I will analyze some passages of the last chapter ("Allegory and Trauerspiel") of Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama; I will then consider the first part ("Allegory and Symbol") of de Man's essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality." Finally, my conclusion deals with the second part of that essay, "Irony."3 I focus on these texts because they are the more complete and structured among the works on allegory written by the two authors, who are both famous for the fragmentariness of their criticism. I will attempt a stylistic reading in order to identify the traces-or perhaps one should say the symptoms-of Benjamin's...