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

commemoration is to writing (Derrida) as convention is to allegory (Benjamin), etc.) has
largely set the stage for Benjamin‟s (and Adorno‟s) reception. Benjamin was the first
modern cultural theorist inasmuch as his work pointed critical study away from a
preoccupation with work immanent textual artifacts that host an embedded verbal icon.
Instead, Benjamin offers a theory of textuality that locates meaning in what lies outside a
text‟s signified content in the materials and historical context of the sign as it is opened
up to view through the critical work of an allegorical interpretation. To that end, Terry
Eagleton notes that what Benjamin reveals is that: “[a]llegory, obsessed as it is by
emblem and hieroglyph, is a profoundly visual form; but what swims into visibility is
nothing less than the materiality of the letter itself” (Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a
Revolutionary Criticism 4). Benjamin‟s radical approach to allegory demonstrates that
the meaning of a text can lay every bit outside its bibliographic apparatus. That is, both
the explicit and implicit commentary that makes clear an allegorical text‟s anagogic
under-sense is every bit as important as what lies inside a text, as the key to its own
always already allegorized (pre-) reading.
Another way to think through what Benjamin means when he claims that allegory
is the expression of convention can be found in what he says about the theological
symbol. Benjamin understands classic theological symbols to be defined by the unity of
their materialization with the transcendental objects that they point out. Benjamin argues
that this unity is distorted in contemporary philosophies that rely on the language of
appearances and essences. For Benjamin, the baroque symbol is, unlike its classical
precursor, not infinite, sacred, or redemptive, but dialectic. Benjamin historicizes the role
of the symbol in aesthetic practice and notes that: “the harmonious inwardness of
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