TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

that which they denote. Hullot-Kentor‟s admirable exploration of Adorno‟s attempt to
inflect the relationship between names and titles with the mediating force of
psychoanalysis shows how that attempt creates tension with Benjamin‟s original theory.
Hullot-Kentor places an obvious and apt emphasis on Kant‟s influence on Adorno,
rendering Adorno‟s belief in the transitoriness of natural history a reflection of Kant‟s
belief that “[t]he objectivity of the idea was formulated subjectively” (126). Hullot-
Kentor‟s attention to the role of Kant in Adorno‟s thought cannot be gainsaid; however, it
is unclear whether he draws the most felicitous conclusion when he argues that, unlike
Adorno, for Benjamin: “[t]he idea is constructed in opposition to natural history” (Hullot-
Kentor 128). Benjamin‟s imbrication of natural history with “fate” – which is neither
history nor nature but a kind of virtuality – needs critical pause. It does not seem
immediately necessary to conclude that when something is virtual it can no longer also be
an idea. This chapter provides the necessary background to a better understanding of
natural history and by extension that which these modernist theorists would assert as
being the fraught purpose of allegory to uncover – the world made taboo by appropriative
titles.
Contemporary aesthetic theories and their commentators have tended to be
insensitive to the assumed differences between Benjamin and Adorno, locating in
imagery of ruins and fragments only those particular features of their debate that are,
ultimately, a caprice of their being made to fit in with post-modern approaches to
language, text, and culture. Benjamin and Adorno‟s thinking about allegory, however,
must be disentwined from a post-modern genealogy such that its own structures of
thought can be explored for what they teach us about the purpose of the actual allegorical
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